At an iconic lot in Hollywood, there’s a new studio in town that wants to change the way you watch everything.
Chris Crema and Matthew Ko are the guys behind Knockout Shorts, a short form, vertical video studio in Los Angeles. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal visited Sunset Las Palmas Studio, where the pair recently opened new standing-set stages in collaboration with Sunset, to hear about their vision for the future of entertainment.
“These are my babies, so I’ll try not to be a salesman on them,” said Crema, who led the tour. Knockout designed these sets with financing from Sunset Studios. There’s an apartment, restaurant, hospital room, office, and courtroom.
“So for this, it’s like why couldn’t you have a “Judge Judy” in the vertical space using this courtroom?” Ko said.
Ryssdal tours the fully furnished and propped office set with Ko and Crema.
Sofa Terenzio
Knockout Shorts makes microdramas, also called verticals or shorts. Simply put, they’re television shows made to watch on your phone. Each episode is one to two minutes long, and a series runs anywhere from 50 to 100 episodes. Most of Knockout’s shows can be found on the streaming apps like DramaBox.
So far, Knockout has produced 10 shows in the year or so they’ve been a studio. They’re hoping to ramp up production this year.
“Standing sets means that this will not move. No one will take it down. It will basically live here permanently in this setup,” explained Crema. “Production designers and teams can come in if they want to paint the walls, if they want to add stuff. That’s great, but at the end of it, they have to reset it back. So basically, in theory, someone could come the next day.”
They may look like traditional Hollywood sets, but standing sets are plug-and-play. They’re fully furnished and rigged with lighting. Crews don’t have to hire set designers or buy props, they can just come in and start shooting.
The lot, Sunset Las Palmas Studios, has a long and storied history. “Mister Ed,” “Jeopardy,” and “The Lone Ranger” were all filmed here. The original “I Love Lucy” set is one stage over. Ko and Crema are betting microdramas could be Hollywood’s next transformation.
A report from Omdia, a market research firm, found that last year, U.S. cellphone users spent more time watching vertical videos than they did watching Netflix, Disney+, or Prime Video on mobile devices.
“This is quite literally the convergence of Hollywood and the vertical space here on the iconic Sunset Las Palmas,” said Ko. “How do you bring people to achieve better quality in this format? In order to do that, you have to work with Hollywood. So that’s what we did.”
Knockout Shorts isn’t the first short-format company to try to make microdramas happen. Meg Whitman and Jeffery Katzenberg’s Quibi, a mobile-first streaming platform for vertical videos, failed in less than seven months despite raising almost $2 billion.
Crema says Knockout will be different. “We haven’t spent 2 billion, that’s one. And two, I think Quibi might have got a little bit unlucky as well with COVID.” In addition, Quibi’s content was longer, with videos in the 10-minute range. Knockout is focusing on episodes that are just a minute to two.
The way these series make money is by getting views. Knockout will sell their shows for a small fee to a streaming app, like DramaBox or Shorticle.
”The first couple are free, and then there’s a paywall in which you have to pay for coins in order to unlock the rest of the season, or you know, buy a subscription to watch weekly, explained Ko. But as the industry changes, that model could change too.
“With TikTok entering the space, TikTok’s model is totally different. It’s free to watch the entire series, but it’s based off ad dollars, so I think that in terms of who’s able to watch verticals in the states, it’s going to change a lot because you don’t have to pay,” said Crema.
“It’s going to evolve in many different ways, and we’re here for the ride,” Ko added.
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