Scott Brown did not set out to make a modest vertical series. After “The Diamond Rose,” his debut microdrama for Holywater’s MyDrama platform, generated 20 million views on its first day, he and his creative partner and executive producer Stacy Howard started asking a harder question: what could this format actually become? The answer was “Playback,” a 17-song original musical about a struggling songwriter navigating identity and authenticity as AI begins reshaping the music industry. It is, by any measure, one of the most ambitious vertical productions attempted to date.
Brown is direct about what drew him to the challenge. “It started to flow organically from that one foundational idea, to do something that had never been done before in verticals,” he said. “In a way that gave audiences what they loved, but elevated.”
Shooting open gate for vertical.
The series stars Amber Laird alongside comedian and internet personality Hannah Stocking, America’s Next Top Model winner Sophie Sumner, Royce Lundquist, and Sarah Sampino. It was produced by Brown’s indie company Second Rodeo and is streaming now on the MyDrama app.
A New Medium, Not Just a New Format
Everyone involved in “Playback” arrived with a version of the same conviction: vertical storytelling is not simply a delivery format, it is a distinct medium with its own grammar. Brown has been working in it long enough to feel that shift viscerally. “I truly believe that vertical storytelling and mobile storytelling in general is a new medium,” he said. “What really has me excited is that these are early days in a whole new way to tell stories.”
Cinematographer Alejo Chauvin, who handled the Mexico-based principal photography, came at it from a cinema background and found the format forced a fundamental rethink. “One of the biggest challenges is narrative,” he said. “So much of what defines a character or a moment lives in what surrounds them within the frame, the space, the environment, the visual context. In vertical, you lose a lot of that horizontal space. So the challenge becomes: how do you still build meaningful frames that carry narrative weight?”
Post Production Supervisor Steve Pesce, who had worked in the Quibi era of vertical content, noted that the technical problems are largely solvable. The deeper question, for him, is where the format goes next. “No one knows how verticals will evolve,” he said. “I am hoping they are going to eventually become more of a hybrid that can play on standard platforms in addition to apps.”
The editing bay in action.
Editor Jim Berkenkamp came to the project during the second half of the editing phase, recruited by Pesce. He brought long-form sensibilities to a format that operates by entirely different rules. “Vertical storytelling has its own language and pacing,” said Berkenkamp. “You have to capture attention immediately and maintain momentum almost constantly, which makes even the smallest details incredibly important.” On his first day, Brown sketched out a graph showing how much character development has to happen within the first five episodes of a microdrama versus a traditional long-form show. The picture came into focus immediately.
Shooting for the Reframe
The principal shoot in Mexico relied on the Sony BURANO and a DJI Ronin 4D, with Cooke S7i lenses on the main unit and Cooke SP4 on the Ronin. Chauvin shot in 6K 16:9 at 23.976fps, capturing S-Log3 with X-OCN LT and ProRes RAW on the BURANO, and ProRes RAW in D-Log on the Ronin. Everything was designed with a 9:16 delivery in mind from the start.
Chauvin and his team made a deliberate decision not to rotate the cameras for vertical capture. Budget, ergonomics, and the package they had assembled made a horizontal approach more practical. Instead, they designed a workflow around the reframe. “We used vertical framelines throughout the shoot, so every decision, blocking, headroom, negative space, was made with the vertical frame in mind,” said Chauvin. “In practice, we were always thinking vertical, even though we were shooting horizontal.”
For the Los Angeles pickups, Brown shot on the Blackmagic PYXIS 6K. The camera’s full open gate sensor and Blackmagic RAW gave the production the exposure latitude and color space it needed to match footage shot under very different conditions. “Having a full open gate sensor as well as the incredible dynamic range of Blackmagic RAW really allowed us to capture a wide variety of images from a wide variety of environments, and have not only the exposure latitude, but the color space to make sure that all of our shots matched,” said Brown.
The PYXIS in action.
Shooting open gate also preserved options in the edit. “Not only does that give you the advantage of potentially having other distribution options later, it really opens up a whole host of options when you’re doing the vertical edit,” Brown said. The reframe work that might seem cumbersome in other pipelines was absorbed efficiently in post, something Brown credited directly to how DaVinci Resolve Studio handles the process. “The suite of tools available to you in the inspector and beyond, and the way that they’re so integrated into the workflow, really makes that adjustment almost instantaneous,” he said.
One Environment, Every Phase
Post production on “Playback” ran entirely within DaVinci Resolve Studio. Brown had made the shift deliberately after finishing “The Diamond Rose,” and by the time “Playback” was in production, the whole company was working inside it. “I’ve been using other editing programs for over a decade, but with Resolve, especially with its most recent updates, it really has turned me into a huge fan of the program,” he said.
The integration between the edit page and the color page was particularly valuable on a project this complex. “You can get into your color workflow, realize that you want to tweak a couple of shots, and just jump right on over to the edit page, tweak those shots, and boom, you’re right back in the color page making those changes,” said Brown. “There are a couple of creative choices that I would never have tried had I not had that seamless integration.” Berkenkamp found the same thing from the editorial side. “Resolve made it easy to move quickly between editorial, audio, and finishing workflows while keeping everything centralized,” he said. “That flexibility became really valuable as the project evolved.”
Fusion handled a significant portion of the VFX work. For a vertical microdrama, the effects load on “Playback” was unusually high, driven by the pace the musical sequences demanded. Pesce noted that staying inside Resolve also allowed the colorist to begin work before the edit was locked, a meaningful time saver on a compressed schedule.
That schedule got compressed further when the colorist had to return to Norway before the grade was complete. The solution was straightforward: he finished the work remotely, with the Blackmagic Cloud Pod keeping everything connected. “We initially were working remotely, but as the deadline approached, we had two bays running in the office and connected them via the Blackmagic Cloud Pod,” said Pesce. “This worked better than even hoped. We had very few issues with lag and were able to edit on one system while doing color on the other.”
The complex timeline in DaVinci Resolve.
Brown described the same experience from his end. Once the Cloud Pod was in place, the file management problems that had been slowing the team down disappeared. “Once we got onto the Cloud Pod and had one master drive connected between both of our primary editing machines, it dramatically improved our workflow,” he said. Berkenkamp put it in terms of the sheer number of moving parts the system had to handle. “It helped streamline collaboration and allowed us to keep media and project updates moving efficiently between different workstations, especially while handling pickups, ADR, graphics, and online revisions simultaneously,” he said.
Brown has come away from “Playback” more convinced than ever that the vertical medium is worth taking seriously, and that the tools have caught up to the ambition. “When you utilize those programs and stay within Blackmagic’s ecosystem, the incredible connectivity between different machines really becomes a no-brainer,” he said. “Within this vertical workflow, this is absolutely the best ecosystem to be in.”
For Chauvin, the lesson was simpler and older than any of the technology. “Storytelling doesn’t live only in the script,” he said. “It lives in the image.” The job on “Playback” was figuring out how to carry that truth into a frame that most of the industry is still learning to see.
Production Credits
| CREW | |
|
Story / Screenplay |
Scott Brown, Joelle Sellner, Stacy Howard |
|
Producer |
Stacy Howard |
|
Director |
Scott Brown |
|
Cinematographer |
Alejo Chauvin |
| Editor |
Jim Berkenkamp |
|
Post Production Supervisor |
Steve Pesce |
| GEAR | |
| Camera |
Sony BURANO, Blackmagic PYXIS 6K, DJI Ronin 4D |
| Primary Lenses |
Cooke S7i, Cooke SP4 |
| Editorial Software | DaVinci Resolve Studio |
| Color Software | DaVinci Resolve Studio |
