Singapore producers take on microdrama boom with SupermodelMe, One Year Love and Spore Fall

SINGAPORE – In 2009, Singaporean producer Karen Seah launched the reality modelling competition SupermodelMe as a web series.

The same year, she founded Refinery Media as an internet-forward production company.

She believed in the digital revolution: YouTube launched in 2005; Netflix began streaming in the United States in 2007, and by 2009, the majority of Singapore households had broadband internet access.

Ms Seah bet that Singaporeans would watch a long-form show on their laptops and internet-linked televisions. She was wrong – SupermodelMe’s first season’s viewership numbers were lacklustre.

“We had to walk back the concept of a web series. We were too ahead of our time. People were not watching shows online as much as they do now,” she says.

All was not lost. Traditional platforms liked the concept, so the show in which women are judged on modelling skills thrived on cable and broadcast television from Seasons 2 to 5. In 2013, the show was nominated for an International Digital Emmy in the Best Non-Fiction category. Season 6 appeared on Netflix in 2021.

Over the years, the show built its brand on women, mostly from South-east Asia, being put through gruelling challenges such as photo shoots with wild animals. Audiences were also hooked on the emotional upheavals that occur when contestants room together.

Refinery Media became so good at the format that it was given the reins of Seasons 5 (2017) and 6 (2018) of rival reality modelling series Asia’s Next Top Model (2012 to 2018).

Now, 17 years after SupermodelMe’s launch, the seventh season will bring the show back to its online roots. SupermodelMe: Make It Or Break It will premiere on microdrama app FlareFlow in July 2026.

In Singapore, national broadcaster Mediacorp has dominated the microdrama space with shows such as the well-received Immigration and Checkpoints Authority drama On The Line (2025).

Now, independent labels are stepping up, with SupermodelMe being among the biggest brands making the move to a mobile app.

As far as Ms Seah knows, no other creator has done what she has – take an existing reality show made for television and retool it for short-form vertical video. These mobile-centric platforms, such as TikTok, Douyin and RedNote, and paid platforms like FlareFlow, ReelShort and DramaBox, have become mobile phone staples around the world.

That she is able to do it is mainly because of rights ownership, experience and passion. This legal carte blanche and deep familiarity, coupled with her desire to break new ground, made the jump possible.

A production curated for pocketable screens costs less to make than one for television. Sponsors – in this case, paint company Nippon Paint and shopping portal Shopee – supported the production.

No more leisurely build-ups

A modelling competition is great for a scrolling medium, as it features attractive people and is harder to flick away with so much eye candy on offer, says Ms Seah.

But it is not just a matter of chopping footage into TikTok-size bits that are two to three minutes long, she adds.

The old format used candid footage of contestants rooming together, letting viewers see characters develop slowly. That leisurely build-up is now gone, replaced by scheduled meet-and-chats.

Judges used to debate their choices in elimination tribunals in front of contestants. That has been replaced by the panel viewing footage of the challenges and making elimination decisions based on the footage.

The time compression demanded by the short-form format has changed casting decisions. For example, the “wallflower who blossoms” character arc – once a staple of the genre – is gone.

“You cannot cast introverts,” says Ms Seah. “From the moment we start the cameras rolling, the contestants have to be extroverted, ready to play. We don’t have time for them to warm up like we used to. They have to be completely verbal from the start.”

The new season starts with eight contestants, though there may be curveballs, she adds. The casting call received 2,000 applications, from as far away as Europe and Africa – previous seasons are available on Netflix around the world – but in the end, the show’s traditional footprint of English speakers from South-east Asia made the cut.

The new season is hosted by Thai-American television personality Cindy Bishop, who also hosted previous seasons of SupermodelMe and Asia’s Next Top Model.

Singapore-born, Bangkok-based actress-model Ase Wang, who has been on SupermodelMe’s judging panel since its second season, says the pace has been a shock.

In previous seasons, the judges would deliberate at length over each contestant’s fate. “We used to discuss: Does this girl stay or does she go? Now it’s like, say what you need to and move on,” she adds.

Joining Wang and Bishop is Indonesian celebrity Patricia Gouw, runner-up in the fourth season of Asia’s Next Top Model.

Mr Timothy Oh, general manager of China-based media company COL Group, says given Singapore’s small market, vertical video platforms are a great way for local producers of scripted content to reach global audiences in a way that allows them to make a living. The group owns FlareFlow.

“This type of content can be formattable, branded, licensable and distributed globally,” he adds.

Twist to K-drama formula

Also available on FlareFlow is One Year Love, a 46-episode scripted romantic comedy produced by Singapore media company TSL Media Group. The show, mainly in English with some Korean dialogue, follows a South Korean expat (Park Min-kyu) who enters a marriage of convenience with a Singaporean workaholic (Nicole Lee), only for complications to arise when his former partner resurfaces.

It premiered on April 9, with the first 10 episodes free on Instagram. The full series is available on FlareFlow and YouTube through their respective paid subscriptions. On YouTube, a basic TSL subscription giving access to all episodes of One Year Love costs $1 a month.

Viewership statistics are not yet available, though the views on Instagram have been healthy, says TSL Media Group chief executive Bryan Choo.

According to him, the microdrama required a six-figure sum to produce, with all of it coming out of the company’s pocket. Each episode runs 60 to 90 seconds.

“It’s equivalent to about a one-hour movie, but cut down into a format which is a lot more digestible these days,” he says.

The series was shot in 14 days, longer than usual for a short-form show, Mr Choo says.

The new season of SupermodelMe, for instance, was filmed in just nine days – a flash compared with the 36 days the traditional version of the show used to take.

To save time and money, the production for One Year Love used backgrounds generated by artificial intelligence.

“Before AI, we would have flown to Seoul to shoot the backstory. It would have cost tens of thousands. But we were able to use a green screen with AI. It’s hard to tell that we weren’t filming in Seoul,” Mr Choo says.

He adds that he deviated from the microdrama playbook, which dictates that the action should start in the middle of a conflict to hook the viewer. One Year Love has a slower build-up, and where the typical microdrama is “just drama non-stop”, he opted for a romcom tone.

He also commissioned an original soundtrack and cast a recognisable face – South Korean reality personality Park Min-kyu from the third season of Netflix reality dating show Single’s Inferno (2021 to present) – against industry advice. One microdrama rule is to never allow the viewer to break immersion, even for a second. Familiar faces are distracting, so microdramas almost always cast unknowns.

“We were advised not to use someone popular, but I also felt there was a lot of marketing value in casting Park,” Mr Choo says.

For Park, it was his first acting role and his first time filming overseas.

He says in an e-mail interview: “Saying my lines in English was quite difficult, and since it was my first time filming overseas, many things felt unfamiliar. Still, I did my best throughout the project.”

His Singaporean co-star Lee, who appeared in local director Tan Siyou’s 2025 drama film Amoeba, says the pace was intense. “We often had only one or two takes per shot, so there was definitely pressure to get it right immediately.”

Mr Choo adds that he wanted One Year Love to be relatable to Singaporean viewers.

“We didn’t want to come off as a Korean show, but rather a Singaporean show with a big K-drama element,” he says.

Scenes were set in hawker centres, and the script features an overbearing mother urging her daughter to get married.

“It’s a relatable dynamic that you see in Singapore culture,” he adds.

Help of AI

Spore Fall, produced by Singapore studio Edenstone, leans even more heavily on AI.  

The 10-episode science-fiction series is free on sporefall.com and on TikTok and YouTube Shorts till end-June. It was made by a team of 11 using generative AI tools to create visuals, including the characters, that would otherwise require a large production budget.

Mr Joel Boh, Edenstone’s founder, says Season 1 cost about $8,000 in software fees, including AI tools.

After June, the team hopes to work on Season 2, which is expected to be released towards the end of 2026 or early 2027.

Set in the fictional city of Lionara, where a deadly spore pathogen outbreak is suppressed by an authoritarian regime, Spore Fall follows a disillusioned soldier and a rogue medic forced to work together.

Mr Boh says AI speeds things up but has limits.

“The continuity problem continues to be an issue,” he adds, referring to AI’s inability to keep a character’s appearance consistent across scenes. Much human intervention by artists and engineers is still necessary.

“This microdrama is a proof of concept. Our objective doesn’t really lie in making money at this point,” says Mr Boh.

The goal is to validate the intellectual property and build an audience before scaling up. The roadmap is ambitious: Seasons 2 and 3 are planned, a novel is 70 per cent done and a feature film is slated for 2028, backed by Silver Media Fund. The Singapore investment fund’s founder, Mr Chan Gin Kai of media production firm Silver Media Group, has come on board as executive producer.

The AI eye candy comes second; a strong, compelling story that resonates comes first, Mr Boh says. There is a hook to the science-fiction story to which he hopes Singaporeans will respond.

“We want to weave in narratives of overcoming weaknesses and turning them into strengths. These are parallels that we see in the Singapore story. Historically, we’ve always worked with constraints. We’re an island nation with no natural resources. But we’re able to overcome our constraints and turn them into strengths,” he adds.