Inside Miss You After Goodbye Clips Fan Favorite Series

Stage One: Often, the Story Exists Before the Script

Somebody has already chosen which story is worth the gamble before anyone shouts «action» on a short drama set. Tracing a few hits backward often turns up a book at the start of the process. ReelShort’s Breaking the Ice, a 2024 hockey romance revolving around a secret child, is based on the novel Shutout by Jami Davenport. A novel by Cora Reilly is the source of Bound by Honor, which ReelShort premiered on November 1, 2025, as Miss You After Goodbye drama a mafia arranged-marriage series. The Korean office romance Quiet in the Office!, from 2026 and given a 19+ age rating, is based on a web novel and webtoon. Several app owners also operate reading businesses, which keeps source material close at hand: Holywater operates the books app My Passion, Crazy Maple Studio produces the interactive-story app Chapters, and GoodShort’s Google Play developer name is GoodNovel. Without a book, writers fall back on well-worn tropes such as revenge, billionaire romance, identity reveals and family drama. Compressing a long drama story into scenes that each serve up a reveal, a reversal or a threat within seconds is the script’s job.

Stage Two: Casting Recognizable Faces

It is at the casting stage that the format’s economics surface on screen. If you look through the cast lists for short series on IMDb, the same names keep showing up. Noah Fearnley headlined ReelShort’s werewolf romance Fated to the Alpha in 2024 and returned in 2025 for Love on the Sidelines, a second-chance story about a former football star. On GoodShort in 2025, Rosa Singerman headlined both Blood and Bones of the Disowned Daughter and Kidnapped by the Mafia, starring opposite Franky Cammarata in the latter. A series has only a handful of free episodes to win you over, so a lead who arrives at the next title with a following from one app has a head start that matters a great deal. Studios are also casting with a specific viewer in mind, since TheWrap reported in October 2024 that about 75 percent of ReelShort’s users were women. DramaBox has a production team in Los Angeles.

Stage Three: Seventy Episodes Filmed in About Eight Days

A Western short drama generally costs $150,000 to $300,000 per series and is shot in eight to ten days, according to TheWrap. The picture is similar in Wikipedia’s overview of the format, where a seven- to ten-day shoot for 50 to 70 or more episodes is pegged at $150,000 to $250,000. Work it out and a 70-episode series shot in eight days works out to close to nine episodes’ worth of material every working day. Chinese producers selling abroad have reported lower numbers still: Jiuzhou Culture put a 70-episode series at $100,000 to $150,000 in China Daily reporting from January 2024. On a per-episode basis, that comes to roughly $1,400 to $2,100 for each finished episode. Dubbed Chinese adaptations made up about 80 percent of the more than 600 titles Jiuzhou reported it had made for overseas markets, and original overseas productions made up 20 percent. With dubbing, a studio can repurpose a finished domestic series, which means the costly shoot happens only once.

Stage Four: Cutting to 60–100 Seconds

Editors chop the footage into episodes of 60 to 100 seconds in the edit suite, framed vertically at 9:16 for a phone. An episode of that length has room for a turn or two of plot, so each one is designed around a question that the next episode promises to answer. The cliffhanger is the house style, the mechanism that carries you from one installment to the next. Taken together, the slivers of a 70-episode series add up to roughly 70 to 117 minutes of screen time. Episode counts vary widely by title, and GoodShort’s official pages list 30 episodes for My Stolen Crown: I Am the Dragon Queen and 100 for The Dragon King’s Return. Viewers who never open the app can still see the same footage, since ReelShort also maintains official channels on YouTube, TikTok and Dailymotion. Editors, in other words, are editing video dramas for several screens at once.

Stage Five: Deciding Where the Paywall Falls

The last creative call is also a commercial one. Under the standard model described by TheWrap, the first eight to ten episodes are free. The free run on ReelShort is usually five to 15 episodes, according to its own blog, and TheWrap counted the first eight in 2024. After that, episodes are unlocked with coins, and ReelShort’s blog gives the standard cost of an episode as about 60 coins. You can also earn coins by watching ads, with one ad unlocking two premium episodes according to the same blog, or buy a weekly VIP pass that costs about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026 and auto-renews. Since prices differ by country, platform and promotion, your store may display a different figure. Placement is the controversial part, because paywalls falling right on a cliffhanger are among the most common complaints about these apps, along with auto-renewing weekly passes and rising coin costs. Tools that promise a way around the wall, such as coin generators and modded «unlimited coins» apps, are unofficial and best left alone.

Stage Six: AI-Generated Series and Animation

The latest production stage does away with the camera entirely. ReelShort now hosts animated motion comics alongside its live-action catalogue. The Lost Heir, a 58-episode family saga, centers on Arthur Lancaster, who loses his memory saving his brother, grows up on a farm as «Johnny» and in the end exposes the foster sister who kept framing him. A 52-episode ReelShort title from 2026, Shattered Vows is an AI-generated animated motion comic that lists no cast; it centers on heiress Vanessa Windsor pursuing revenge on the husband and best friend who helped her sister’s killer escape. It should not be confused with a separate 58-episode ShortMax series that shares the name. DramaWave has gone furthest: according to 36Kr, more than 80 percent of its newly released content is AI-generated, and the outlet also reported that the app’s annualized revenue exceeded $700 million by the second quarter of 2026. Beyond the apps, AI video dramas have spread too, as Fruit Love Island, an AI-made parody of Love Island featuring fruit contestants, showed on TikTok in March 2026 before critics widely labeled it «AI slop».

Stage Seven: A Hollywood Studio Steps Onto the Line

The clearest example of traditional studios noticing is Fox Entertainment. In October 2025, Holywater, the Kyiv-founded company behind the My Drama app, received an equity investment from Fox. Fox also promised to produce more than 200 vertical titles over two years. Among the Fox-produced series already on the app are Billionaire Blackmail, Bound by Obsession and My Heart’s Offside. Holywater secured a further $22 million in January 2026 through a round led by Horizon Capital; My Drama, meanwhile, took home the 2025 Webby Award for Best Streaming Service. A network-scale producer committing to that volume suggests the eight-day shoot has shifted from curiosity to line item.

The Production Line at a Quick Glance

The logic of the business comes into focus when the stages are placed side by side. The fixed, expensive block is the shoot, and much of the rest is built around it. Scripts tend to come in pre-tested as novels or familiar tropes, known faces carry the casting, and cliffhangers that feed a paywall drive the edit. TheWrap and Wikipedia describe broadly similar methods across the category, although fans who search for a «reel short drama» usually have ReelShort titles in mind. The table below lays out typical time and cost at each stage, using only publicly reported figures. Rather than guessing, it says so where no reliable number has been published.

Stage	Typical time / cost	What happens
Source material and script	No public number	A novel, web fiction or proven trope is adapted; Breaking the Ice adapts Shutout, and Bound by Honor adapts Cora Reilly’s novel
The casting stage	No public number	Leads are picked, often actors with earlier short-drama credits; animated titles bypass this step
Shoot	7–10 days; $150K–250K (Wikipedia) or $150K–300K per series (TheWrap); $100K–150K per 70 episodes (Jiuzhou)	50 to 70+ episodes are shot in a vertical frame
The edit	Episodes lasting 60–100 seconds	Footage is split into installments that each end on a cliffhanger
Release and paywall	The first 8–10 episodes free (TheWrap); on ReelShort, about 60 coins per later episode	Viewers unlock episodes with coins, ads or a weekly pass of about $19.99 in the US App Store as of September 2026
Animation and AI	No costs disclosed	Motion comics such as The Lost Heir and Shattered Vows; over 80 percent of DramaWave’s new releases made with AI
Co-production with a studio	200+ titles over two years (Fox for My Drama)	An established studio makes vertical series for an app