Kristen Brancaccio Chris Jon Directing a microdrama and directing a feature-length film are very different tasks, typically diverging in budgets, schedules and expectations for a viewer’s attention span.
But in an era when more up-and-comers and film school grads are going straight into the verticals business, it’s possible that some of Hollywood’s next big feature directors could emerge from the world of bite-sized entertainment. What exactly would that transition look like? Kristen Brancaccio, who The Hollywood Reporter has learned was just tapped by Graviteur Studios to helm its first feature film Crush Party, has a pretty good idea.
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Brancaccio has an impressive resume in the microdrama world. She’s directed 21 verticals, including one bona fide hit in Screen Time, the first microdrama from Issa Rae’s company Hoorae Media, which earned nearly 75 million views in its first week on TikTok and PineDrama. She also directed one of aTwist’s first projects, Hollywood Starlet, produced by The Bold and the Beautiful producer Bradley Bell, and the Audible vertical Southern Belle Insults starring Keke Palmer.
That’s not to mention her work on YouTube, which is how Brancaccio broke into the business, working on the comedy channel The Key of Awesome and then as an independent contractor directly for the platform. Crush Party, beginning principal photography in 2027, will be her first-ever feature.
For Graviteur Studios development and production head Emerson Davis, Brancaccio’s non-traditional background was a big draw. The indie studio, which launched earlier this year as a joint venture between Dolphin Entertainment and KYNETIC Media Ventures, is focused on creator-driven storytelling at a moment when next-gen directors like Curry Parker and Kane Parsons are burning up the box office. The Graviteur team found Brancaccio through Screen Time, which they enjoyed, later to be impressed by her range as a director.
“With Kristen, she’s shown how exceptional of a storyteller she is across formats and genres,” Davis said in an interview. “Some of our early conversations were both about story but a lot about connecting with an audience and what audience are we trying to reach. She brings that natural ability to think like that.”
As her journey may — or may not — be a bellwether for promising verticals directors in the future, Brancaccio was game to discuss how it happened. In an interview, she talked about the evolution of the microdrama industry, transferable skills and staying audience-focused in traditional moviemaking.
Let’s start with how you got into microdramas in the first place. What led you to the verticals industry?
I have a background in the digital space. I started my career on YouTube and over the years have worked on a ton of projects that met where digital and traditional industry converged. And one of the projects that I did was I wrote and directed a pilot for SyFy that was meant to be a digital show. SyFy never ended up going that route, but that pilot ended up with some producers at ReelShort in very early 2024. And it had a very strong romance element and that’s what they were looking for. I got a phone call and they just sort of explained, “Hey, there’s a new format in town. We’re shooting this movie vertically. Are you interested in directing it?” And the rest is history.
Do you have any idea how they got their hands on the SyFy pilot?
Yes. The production designer from that pilot is friends with a producer from a microdrama production company that was working with ReelShort. So it was just one of those projects that I had written off as a bummer that it never went further than it did, but then ended up totally changing the trajectory of my career path. And I think there were a few reasons they resonated with it. Obviously, the fact that there was romance in this pilot. The budget level was, I would say, comparable to what a lot of microdrama budgets are. And again, it was made for digital, so it moved pretty quickly.
I very quickly understood this [microdrama] format. I was like, “Oh, this is for the people. This is what the audience loves. The audience that is reading Wattpad, the audience that is consuming romance, people that just want certain plot points to be hit at a certain speed, people that are addicted to TikTok, they’re expecting a certain cadence and that’s what these shows deliver.”
How have you noticed the microdrama industry changing or evolving in particular ways over the last few years?
We’re starting to see different lanes emerge. At first, these apps were interchangeable. Now they’re starting to realize the value in building their brand. That’s something that traditional Hollywood players understand very well. And so the people coming into the space like Issa Rae, she knows her audience inside and out, so she’s going to deliver a really compelling, well-told story, perfectly suited for digital, that is going to be high production value. She’s not going to follow the same cadence or rules that ReelShort follows. It’s just a totally different approach, but it’s very, very successful. The one I did for her has at least 250 million views, if not more.
And then we’re also seeing a lot of very talented people [that] really understand the audience they’re going for. They’re not ignoring the work that has been done so far in the microdrama space. I think they’re doing a very good job actually of analyzing that, what has worked so far? Why has it worked? What can we do differently?
As you’ve been working on all these microdramas, how did the chance to direct this feature come up for you?
This is what I was hoping and praying that this corner of the industry would lead to. For a long time, verticals were in this… almost a silo. It was just shoved to the corner. I don’t know if “stigma” is maybe too strong a word, but there wasn’t an understanding that there was value in what we were doing and in the skills that we were developing. I have a background in producing and I was just consistently blown away by frankly what I could accomplish myself, but also what everyone in this corner of the industry is doing. We’re doing so much in such a fast timeline. We’re doing it consistently. We’re turning out a movie a month, essentially. I was like, man, I hope other industry players notice this.
It all starts with a phone call coming out of the blue and [I] found out that David and Bill at Graviteur were…. I think it was Screen Time that had caught their eye. They had this movie script that they developed in-house, they were looking for a director and they really saw the value in somebody with vertical experience, somebody that had all those skills that I mentioned, both the technical and the creative, that comes from just working in digital and specifically working in verticals. I was so excited to get that call because I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is everything. This is what I hoped would happen. People are recognizing the value in these skills.”
What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned in the microdrama industry that you’re planning on bringing to your work on Crush Party?
I’ve met some very, very talented, skilled people who can accomplish a lot on a limited budget, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, [and I’m] actually wanting to bring some people with me.
Aside from that, I think the aspect that I’m going to bring with me to Crush Party and other projects is I feel like I keep the audience in mind in a different way and meet the audience where they are. And what’s nice about this script in particular is it’s targeting an audience that is thriller and horror. Those are emerging genres in the microdrama space and fans are starting to really respond to them. When you’re thinking about the audience, it causes you to think about the whole project in a different way. So many filmmakers forget that you’re making your movie for an audience and you can make the best movie in the world, but if it doesn’t reach the audience, no one’s going to see it and that’s such a shame. So who is your audience? What is it they’re looking for? What matters to them? That needs to matter to you too.
On the flip side, are there any elements when it comes to working on a feature that you feel will really stretch you as a director?
When you make a lot of microdramas, you understand the time you have and the decisions you make are usually to meet those demands on time and budget. Unfortunately, time, budget, creative is the order in which you have to think about things. It’s a necessity; thinking the opposite way will make you crazy in the microdrama space. But I think it’s going to be a little bit of a brain rearrangement, a very lovely one, to maybe be able to say, okay, obviously this is not a massive budget studio feature, right? So I’m aware of what this budget is and what it can get me, but it does allow me to think creatively first, and then assess, okay, does this work with the time and budget that we have?
In general, what kind of preparation do you think microdramas offer early-career directors for working in other formats like features?
I think the value in directing microdramas is learning the skill of shooting for the edit. You don’t have time to find the movie in post. So even if you have time on set, which you never do, at the end of the day, these post timelines are so tight, you don’t have time to try and shape it into anything else. And obviously your scripty [script supervisor] is hopefully there to help you, but as a director, you also need to learn that skill.
Working with actors, you don’t have time for a ton of takes. So learning very quickly how to communicate to an actor, how to quickly understand maybe why isn’t a scene working or what could we adjust in this scene to make it better or to change the energy of the scene. You get very quick. So I think overall it’s getting your reps in all these different areas. You’re shooting multi-cam, you have to be able to hold in your head what multiple cameras are doing. I think there’s just so much value in the technical, practical skills of directing when you’re directing microdramas.
What are your ultimate aspirations as a director and where do you want to go from here?
I’m going to sound like a cliché, but I love telling stories. And so I think I’m very interested in telling stories in lots of different mediums, lots of different ways. I don’t know what the future of my career looks like, but I’m pretty confident that it will involve somehow combining my digital experience with narrative experience. And whether that’s in more digitally focused projects or more films or streaming projects, I don’t know. But that seems to be what my career has flirted [with] consistently, at that meeting point.
And I think Graviteur has the right idea in that they’re creating a movie that is a very traditional format, but just the fact that they even hired me, they’re thinking about it also with the eye towards what matters in digital, what skills do people coming from digital bring to the table, which is very cool. I think they’re a little ahead of the curve on that. I mean, we’ve obviously also seen many examples of YouTube creators doing this very successfully, but I think that will stop being an outlier and that will start being a more established pipeline.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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