Creative Producer Jingyi Li Talks Short Film ‘Happy Birthday,’ Rise of Vertical Dramas and The Art of Working With Actors

If you have spent any time scrolling through TikTok, ReelShort, or GoodShort lately, you have likely stumbled into a hyper-addictive cinematic universe where long-lost heiresses enact elaborate revenges, submissive daughters-in-law suddenly reclaim their family fortunes, and billionaire CEOs double as campus alphas. 

Welcome to the lucrative, lightning-fast world of vertical drama—a mobile-first ecosystem of high-density, premium serialized narratives that is currently reshaping digital entertainment.

As part of this binge-worthy engine is Los Angeles-based producer, Jingyi Li. With a portfolio that includes vertical hits like Sneak Me In Your Closet My Prince, When Flowers Seek Revenge, and After Divorced I Enter My Cougar Era, Li has become an expert in cross-cultural, high-emotion digital storytelling. 

These narrative credits have collectively accumulated millions of views, with several titles surfacing prominently across GoodShort’s own discovery sections, from the “Popular” genre to the “Top in GoodShort” pages. This visibility reflects Li’s distinctive ability as a creative producer to translate high-conflict serialized storytelling into fast-paced mobile formats that feels accessible to North American audiences.

Shifting the Paradigm: What It Means to Be a Creative Producer

For Li, producing is not a choice between logistics and creativity. It requires both: the ability to manage budgets, schedules, crews, and post-production demands while also protecting the emotional and visual direction of the story.

“I think producers are involved not only in managing production, but also in shaping the emotional, visual, and storytelling direction of a project from beginning to end,” Li explains. “Because I also come from a directing background, I pay close attention to performance, emotional pacing, casting, visual tone, and how audiences emotionally experience a story on screen.”

This holistic philosophy allows her to move between macro-level creative strategy and the tactical decisions required on set, where story, performance, schedule, and resources have to be aligned in real time. Across vertical dramas, independent narrative projects such as Happy Birthday and The Green Card, and short-form commercial productions, Li’s producing work has required her to make decisions across development, casting, visual planning, production logistics, post-production supervision, and final delivery.

“On many projects, my involvement continues far beyond filming,” Li says. “For me, producing means staying responsible for the creative thread of a project as it moves from the first idea to the final cut. Every stage changes the story in some way, so I try to make sure the emotional intention does not get lost in the process.”

Cracked Codes and Micro-Masterclasses

Navigating the vertical drama market requires an acute understanding of audience engagement patterns. In a fast-moving digital ecosystem, narratives must establish an immediate thematic and emotional hook to sustain viewer retention from the very opening frames.

To achieve this, Li bridges Chinese short-drama storytelling conventions with the U.S.-based production environments, tailoring high-conflict narrative structures for an international digital audience.

The pace is grueling, and the timelines are compressed, requiring her to work closely with the U.S.-based actors who must deliver emotionally legible performances within limited rehearsal time and fast-moving production schedules.

For Li, working with actors is not separate from producing. In a format built on close framing and rapid emotional turns, casting and performance guidance become central to whether a story can hold an audience’s attention.

“I think working with actors begins with emotional trust and communication,” Li notes. “Especially in vertical dramas and fast-paced productions, actors often have to enter emotional states very quickly, so creating an environment where performances feel emotionally grounded becomes very important.”

From Vertical Screens to the Festival Circuit

For Li, 9:16 is a language, not a boundary. Her work in mobile-first entertainment has sharpened her understanding of pace, audience engagement, and emotional immediacy, but she refuses to let one format define the worlds she wants to build.

Her recent short film Happy Birthday, which she wrote, directed, and produced, serves as both a standalone short and a production proof-of-concept for Kathy’s Afterlife, a feature-length fantasy drama currently under her development.

The story world reads like a surreal, melancholic fable: “Three years ago, Kathy Green was killed in a car accident while on her way to buy a birthday gift for her granddaughter,” notes Li. “Since then, she has endured countless hardships in the ghost world, all for one chance to obtain a pass back to the living world and save her granddaughter.”

The project represents a complex creative and logistical undertaking, with Li leading the film from script and direction through post-production as its writer, director, and executive producer. 

Beginning with her own concept sketches, she established and oversaw the VFX workflow needed to translate the story’s ghost-world imagery into an executable production pipeline, supervising the cross-departmental creative and technical process across 3D modeling, 2D FX, and live-action integration.

“I wanted to create a vast, void-like ocean environment with a giant tombstone at its center, a visual world designed not as spectacle alone, but as an emotional extension of grief, memory, and the afterlife,” she said. “For me, visual effects are not just technical tools; they are part of emotional storytelling and visual metaphor.”

The project recently began its festival run with an Official Selection at the New York Monthly Film Festival, offering early external recognition for a short that Li sees as both an emotional story and a proving ground for the larger long-form narrative project she is building.

The Big Picture

For Li, the evolution of modern entertainment is not defined only by the platforms or formats she moves through. Whether working in theater, theater in education, live broadcasting, vertical drama, or independent film, she sees each medium as a different vessel for the same creative pursuit.

“Whether I am working with a stage, a 16:9 cinematic frame, a 9:16 mobile screen, or a more immersive medium in the future, the difference is ultimately one of form,” Li reflects. “What I am always pursuing is how to tell a story, how to render a world, how to observe human nature, and how to express ideas and emotions with honesty. I don’t believe our creative future will be limited by the dimensions of a screen. As audiences move from the stage to cinema, television, computers, smartphones, and potentially more immersive forms, I want to stay responsive to those changes while holding onto the emotional core of the work.”

Driven by themes of memory, loneliness, emotional connection, mortality, and the human search for meaning within changing societies, Li approaches each format not as a boundary, but as a different way of building emotionally resonant visual worlds.