Screenburn Group launches AI tool to write full microdrama seasons

Scripted entertainment specialist Screenburn Group has launched AI software The Writers Room, which uses genAI to write full series of microdramas.

The Writers Room takes a writer’s plan for a story and writes all 80 episodes of a microdrama season in a few hours. Screenburn Group says the software “writes 80 episodes that hold together from the first to the last”.

The Writers Room works by a writer planning their story on Screenburn, the company’s screenwriting platform. The writer provides the title, a one-line summary, the characters, and answers to a set of questions about them. They then simply tell the Writers Room to write to scripts for 80 episodes.

A few hours later they have a finished season, consisting of around 29,000 words of screenplay.

The Writers Room writes to a set of rules for how a season opens, turns and ends, drawn from data about more than 100,000 vertical series.

Once the season is written, the Retention Engine reads every episode and scores it on four things: how episode one opens, how each episode ends, how often each episode tells the viewer something new, and how the tension builds across the season. Scores run out of 100; 80 or above earns the Screenburn Certified mark. The company filed a US patent application for the engine in August.

More than 20 seasons written this way are on sale now here. Each shows its Retention Engine score on the page; the highest is 97.

All finished, scored seasons is available for anyone to pitch, sell or produce.

The Writers Room is available by subscription at US$1,350 a month on a 12-month contract, which covers the writer and up to five of their colleagues, and includes one season a month. Extra seasons are $1,350 each.

Katharina Gellein Viken, co-founder, Screenburn Group, said: “Screenburn is a by-writers-for-writers tool. We all knew LLMs couldn’t write sensibly without real people at the helm, and now there is finally a modernised system where writers can deliver both the traditional way, and at volume - for any platform.”

Dr Charles Kriel, founder and CEO, Screenburn Group, added: “For a year anyone with a laptop has been able to make the pictures. Nobody could write the show in a couple hours. We studied what holds an audience across centuries of storytelling and a hundred thousand vertical series, wrote the rules down, and built software that writes to them. A writer plans a story in an afternoon and has their full season, scored, before anyone spends a dollar making it. That changes what development costs, how long it takes, and who can afford to do it.”