For most of film history, turning a screen sideways meant you were ready to watch. Now, a fast-growing corner of the entertainment industry wants audiences to keep it upright.

Vertical dramas are scripted, serialized stories made for the way people already hold their phones. Episodes last only a few minutes, moving from hook to reversal to cliffhanger before the viewer can scroll away. The format first took off in China, where short dramas found a massive mobile audience. Its global expansion has followed a familiar playbook: whirlwind romances, family betrayals, and enough twists to keep the next episode irresistible.

For a while, verticals could be dismissed as just another internet curiosity. That is getting much harder to do.

SAG-AFTRA now has an agreement specifically designed for serialized vertical productions. Studios, producers, and veteran executives are entering the space. Vivian Yin, the former CEO of FremantleMedia China and a growing presence in Christian media circles, is building LumiView, a platform that treats vertical dramas as part of a larger story world.

Much of the format still lives comfortably in soap-opera territory, and not every story benefits from being broken into two-minute pieces. But the genres dominating verticals today don’t necessarily have to define what they become tomorrow.

That possibility is drawing the attention of faith-driven filmmakers. For creators used to limited budgets, verticals offer a practical way to test a premise, introduce characters, and build an audience before taking on a feature or series. They may also reach viewers who would never seek out faith-based entertainment through its usual channels.

The opportunity isn’t simply to bring Christian stories into a growing format. It’s to help widen the kinds of stories that format can tell.

Quibi may be remembered as a failed platform, but its limited series Wireless remains one of its boldest storytelling experiments. The 10-episode survival thriller followed a college student stranded after a car crash, offering two distinct ways into his story: landscape mode showed his physical fight to stay alive, while portrait mode revealed the texts, maps, calls, and social feeds on his phone. Rotating the screen didn’t simply reframe the image. It uncovered another layer of the narrative.

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Opening August 14 in theaters. A stadium-filling rock star is forced to confront the life he has built after addiction leads to a near-fatal heart attack. Inspired by a true story, Elijah Peel finds its emotional center in his unexpected friendship with a terminally ill young girl whose faith begins to reach him when little else can. Their connection slowly pushes him to reckon with his past and consider what redemption might look like from here.

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Filmmakers Kevin Sepe and Terry Harris are making room for two very different kinds of screens.

Through their film company, Harris/Sepe Films, the pair is preparing to bring Elijah Peel to theaters on August 14 while also launching The Jesus Broker, a serialized vertical drama made for phones. One project asks viewers to settle into a theater. The other has to earn their attention a few minutes at a time.

For Sepe, Elijah Peel is tied closely to his own story. After years of addiction and several brushes with death, he found sobriety, returned to faith, and began asking what to do with the life he had been given back.

“When you’ve been delivered spiritually and physically, your whole existence becomes about how you give that back,” he told The Christian Post.

While the film isn’t a retelling of those years, it carries many of the same questions: what redemption costs, whether purpose can follow failure, and how a person begins again.

The Jesus Broker takes those ideas into less familiar territory. Premiering September 30 on FaithDramas, the series was built for the vertical frame, with short episodes designed for viewers already accustomed to watching stories on their phones. It’s part of an initial slate for audiences looking for faith-driven entertainment in a space still dominated by romance and melodrama.

What makes the two projects worth considering together is the willingness to let each story find its own form.

That may matter more as faith-based entertainment moves beyond the usual divide between theaters and streaming. eKKL Entertainment, which is releasing Elijah Peel, is building a broader ecosystem around films, podcasts, devotionals, and community. Harris and Sepe are approaching the same shift from the filmmaking side, testing how one creative mission might live across more than one screen.

The theater is not disappearing, and neither is the phone. The filmmaking duo is simply trying to make good use of both.

The results are in, and we have a tie! 50% of you voted for “Whether there’s truth behind the joke” in last week’s poll: When Christian culture becomes the punchline, what matters most? The other half chose “Whether the joke is actually funny.”

Most filmmakers are taught to start with the story and decide on the format later. Is it a feature? A series? Something else?

Vertical storytelling flips that order upside down.

Its short episodes and fast pacing put an idea under pressure early. The premise has to land quickly, the characters need to create curiosity, and each chapter must earn the next.

Verticals: The Movie puts that idea into practice. The short film follows an aspiring actor who books his first vertical production and lands inside the rushed schedules, heightened romances, and familiar clichés of the format. While the filmmakers are in on the joke, they also understand what the work has made possible: paid jobs, on-set experience, and another place for actors and crews to sharpen their craft.

That mix of satire and real affection helped the project find support. The team set a $5,000 production goal on Seed&Spark and ultimately raised more than $8,300, giving them an early sign that the premise connected beyond their own circle.

In that sense, the short is doing more than poking fun at a young industry. It shows how a smaller project can test an idea, build experience, and gather an audience before anyone asks it to become something bigger.

This reflects the principle behind the P.R.O.V.E. Method™:

The takeaway isn’t just to squeeze the same story into a smaller frame. It’s to use the frame to learn what works, prove that an audience is there, and decide what has earned the chance to grow.

_{*Plumb News is not affiliated with “Verticals: The Movie” or Seed*&Spark and does not receive compensation for featuring it. We’re just highlighting it because we believe projects like this deserve support.}

“For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.” – Zechariah 4:10 (ESV)

Maybe that’s why the image of a plumb line still resonates. It asks a simple question: is what we are building standing true?

It doesn’t measure how impressive the structure looks or how quickly it rises. It points instead to the foundation beneath it and the care being taken along the way. In that sense, true vertical isn’t just about appearance. It’s about alignment.

That feels especially fitting beside Zechariah’s reminder not to despise small beginnings. Much of what matters starts quietly, before there is an audience, a clear path, or any promise of something larger. In those early stages, the work is still taking shape. Patience and purpose matter more than attention.

The shape of the work may change as new doors open and old ones close. But through every shift, the plumb line offers the same invitation: to keep checking whether what we are building still reflects the purpose that set it in motion.

As the work takes shape and new doors open, the aim may be less about building bigger for its own sake and more about staying true to what set the work in motion.

Plumb News intends to grow, with PlumbTales and TrueVerticals. Stay tuned.

Until next time,

THE PLUMB NEWS TEAM