Guest Post: Building a Solution for Fast Vertical Drama Production
Guest Post by Nick Harty from Storiara
Today, we have another free guest post from Nick Harty from Storiara.
If you’d also like to contribute a guest post, feel free to get in touch via hello@behindtheverticals.com.
Vertical Production Moves Fast. The Tools Didn’t. So We Reinvented Them.
Vertical drama has become one of the fastest-moving parts of entertainment, but the production infrastructure around it still feels stuck in another era. Teams are working on tight timelines, lean crews, and constant turnaround, yet prep still often happens through spreadsheets, text threads, late-night schedule reshuffles, and someone trying to manually keep the whole thing from falling apart.
That disconnect stood out to us. For a format built on speed, volume, and small teams, almost nobody seemed to be building infrastructure specifically for vertical creators like us.
And for people coming into vertical from more traditional production roles, that gap becomes obvious quickly. The workflows they’re used to were designed for longer timelines, larger departments, and more margin for error.
Our world doesn’t really work like that.
Why we started building this
My fellow producers Spencer, Charlie, and I kept running into the same problem on our own productions. The creative work was exciting. The coordination was exhausting.
Every time an actor’s availability changed, the schedule had to be rebuilt. A location shift created a ripple effect across the whole plan. Scenes, props, cast, timing, all of it had to be tracked manually. And because the teams were small, that work usually fell on the same few people already doing everything else.
That feels especially true in vertical. A lot of our teams are effectively running mini-studios. We’re developing, producing, shooting, and releasing episodes at a pace traditional production systems were never designed for.
So the problem is not just that prep is annoying. Prep becomes the thing that slows everything else down.
We were honestly surprised more people weren’t building for that reality. So about a year ago, we decided to build it ourselves.
What Storiara actually does
That’s what led us to build Storiara.
It takes a script and turns it into the foundation of a shoot plan. It breaks down scenes, identifies characters, props, and locations, and helps generate a workable schedule around real production constraints like cast availability and location access.
The goal isn’t to automate filmmaking. It’s to take hours of coordination off our plates so teams can stay focused on actually making the thing.
A year in, more than 550 production teams are already using Storiara. Some have saved up to 60 hours of prep and $15,000 to $20,000 per project by cutting down the manual coordination that usually eats up pre-production.
For vertical productions especially, that matters. Prep often falls on a very small team, sometimes one person wearing three different hats. If you can go from script to a clear plan much faster, you give that team breathing room. You make it easier to move fast without everything feeling chaotic.
That’s really the whole idea.
Vertical creators don’t need heavier systems. We need better ones. Infrastructure that matches the way we actually work.
If you’re already working in vertical, or trying to adapt your workflow from more traditional production, try Storiara on your next project. Upload a script, build a shoot plan, and see how much prep time it takes off your plate.