Eighty episodes of two minutes each is just under three hours of finished drama. On a traditional set that would take months. Vertical productions routinely deliver it in three weeks, and the reason is the calendar rather than the crew size.
Week one: locations and blocks#
The script is broken into beats and every beat is assigned to a location before a single scene is shot. A living room that appears in thirty episodes is shot for all thirty in one go, out of story order.
Week two: two units, one schedule#
A main unit handles dialogue-heavy scenes with the leads. A second unit shoots inserts, establishing shots and anything without principal cast, often in the same building on a different floor.
- Main unit: performances, confrontations, the scenes episodes end on.
- Second unit: cutaways, phones and documents, exteriors, crowd moments.
- Both units share one continuity supervisor, which is where most mistakes are caught.
Week three: the edit#
Editing runs alongside the final days of the shoot. Episodes are cut to end on the beat the script marked, and anything that runs long is trimmed from the middle, never the end.
