Raindance to Launch U.K.’s First Major Vertical Festival and Market (EXCLUSIVE)
I keep thinking about what "vertical" actually means for storytelling. We've spent a century composing images for wide screens, and suddenly the canvas is a phone held upright. That's not a small tweak. It changes how you frame a face, how you pace a reveal, how you hold attention when someone's thumb is hovering over the skip button. Raindance giving this its own festival feels like an admission that vertical is a genuine language, not a compressed version of something else.
The $150 billion figure is the kind of number that makes you blink. That's a scale larger than most film industries. I'd want to know how much of that is advertising versus subscription versus transactional, because the business model will shape what stories get told. If it's all ads, we get cliffhangers engineered for retention. If people pay, we might get something stranger and more personal.
I'm curious whether Raindance can bridge the gap between the TikTok-native creators and the traditional film world that still sniffs at phone screens. A festival won't fix that overnight, but it's a start. I'd love to see what a vertical film actually looks like when it's made with festival ambitions, not just algorithmic ones.