In Los Angeles, one of the most urgent conversations in entertainment is no longer only about what audiences watch, but how quickly they decide to keep watching.
Film producer Jingyi Li would know. While legacy Hollywood continues to grapple with long development cycles and traditional distribution models, Li has built a career at the intersection of vertical drama, creative producing, and next-generation digital media, working within a 9:16 mobile-first format that has reshaped how serialized stories are produced and consumed.
Li’s career moves across independent narrative filmmaking, mobile-first serialized entertainment, and performance-driven commercial video production. Across producer and director roles, her credits include several narrative short films, roughly a dozen vertical drama series for platforms such as DramaBox, ShortMax and GoodShort, and hundreds of short-form commercial video productions for mobile games and digital products including Vita Mahjong and Tile Explorer. Across these formats, Li’s producing work centers on translating creative and commercial objectives into executable production plans, coordinating talent and crew, supervising production and post-production, and delivering platform-ready content for audiences, clients, and digital distribution channels.
She is also part of a rapidly evolving industry that has, in many ways, taken over the phones — if not yet the studios — of American audiences. While vertical dramas first gained momentum in China in the early 2020s as “duanju” — condensed serialized dramas designed for mobile viewing — the format has since evolved into a professionalized production ecosystem for vertical mini-series. Over the past six years, it has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. Shot for 9:16 smartphones, these 1 to 3 minute episodes rely on cliffhangers to keep audiences hooked. They are posted to subscription-based apps, like ReelShort, DramaBox and GoodShort, and vertical dramas have become mainstream, globally.
The innovation is not only that audiences can watch these stories on a phone from almost anywhere; it is that the format breaks down both the spatial and temporal barriers of serialized storytelling. Viewers can follow characters, conflicts, reversals, and emotional payoffs in a structure closer to television drama, but with the accessibility and time commitment of a feature film. As the format has grown into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, vertical dramas have also created a new production ecosystem for U.S.-based actors, producers, directors, and crew members at a time when traditional studio production has faced cutbacks.
“Producing, for me, is never limited to only being on set,” Li said. Her perspective carries the grounded weight of someone who has mastered the entire lifecycle of a project. “A large part of the work happens before filming begins and continues through post-production and final delivery.”
The growing world of mobile-first vertical dramas moves at a velocity that requires a producer to pivot between a macro-level creative vision and micro-level logistics. During her tenure with Tap Story at GoodShort, Li became the critical bridge between creative development, production execution and platform delivery.
When evaluating whether a script was ready to move forward in the production pipeline, Li explains that the calculus relied heavily on a deep understanding of human psychology.
“One of the most important things is emotional engagement,” said Li. “Vertical dramas rely heavily on pacing, cliffhangers, character dynamics, and audience retention, so we constantly had to think about how quickly a story could emotionally hook audiences and make them invested in a character’s fate. The goal is to make viewers curious, emotionally attached, and eager to keep watching.”
Yet Li’s strength does not come only from understanding what makes a script compelling. It comes from knowing how to turn that understanding into production reality, aligning story, casting, location, schedule, crew, and post-production so the emotional promise of a script can survive the speed of production.
Li’s directing background also shapes how she approaches producing. Having worked across narrative shorts and vertical drama productions, she brings a director’s sensitivity to performance, visual tone, casting, and emotional pacing into her work as a producer.
Since these productions move extremely quickly, producers often have to make creative and operational decisions at the same time, while constantly thinking from the audience’s perspective,” Li says. “Since I also come from a directing background, I pay a lot of attention to performance, emotional pacing, visual tone, and casting.”
In a medium where characters are framed in a tight 9:16 aspect ratio on a handheld screen, there is nowhere for a performance to hide. “Casting instinct is especially important because audiences form emotional attachments to characters very quickly,” she notes. “Producers need to constantly evaluate how emotionally readable a character or scene feels on screen.”
Traditional filmmaking allows for slow-burn exposition and expansive, cinematic world-building. Vertical serialization, by contrast, demands instant hooks and high-frequency emotional cliffhangers. The visual framing drops environmental context in favor of intense, portrait-mode close-ups that drive character investment. Because the delivery cycles are so tightly compressed, producers must manage highly agile pipelines that respond to viewer behavior in near-real time.
That producing fluency extends beyond vertical drama. Li has worked on independent narrative shorts including Green Card and Happy Birthday, while also managing short-form commercial video productions for mobile games and digital products including Tile Explorer and Vita Mahjong. Moving between narrative and commercial work has made her especially fluent in shifting between the storyteller’s perspective and the audience’s point of view, a skill that allows her to protect a project’s creative intention while keeping its emotional impact, production demands, and market-facing delivery in focus.
That perspective also shaped her mentoring work during graduate school, when she mentored undergraduate film students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In that role, Li helped emerging filmmakers understand the delicate balance between artistic vision, production realities, and commercial expectations in screen production.
Li’s fascination with audience psychology naturally led her to conquer another frontier of modern media: live broadcasting. As a Live Streaming Director for CHC Fashion Group, she treated the medium not merely as a marketing tool, but as a living, breathing iteration of real-time fashion sales. The company specializes in live fashion sales on TikTok, featuring over 40 brands, 60 in-house hosts and has generated over $50 million in revenue in 2024 alone.
For Li, working in that environment meant learning how creative choices are tested instantly against viewer behavior and commercial response. It became another way to study pacing, attention, performance, and emotional engagement in real time.
“I think livestreaming is powerful not only because it is interactive and immediate, but because it is fundamentally a form of real-time storytelling and emotional engagement,” said Li. “Unlike traditional film or television, there is no editing process to reshape the experience afterward. Live production teams have to constantly adjust pacing, emotional energy, and presentation in real time based on audience reactions and engagement.”
Her time directing live broadcasts served as an elite training ground for her current narrative work. “It trained me to think very carefully about when audiences become emotionally invested, when attention begins to drop, and how storytelling pacing can influence real-time engagement,” she said.
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