Visualizing Verticalization at Scale: A Q&A with Ateliere's Flavius Goman on Ateliere Storyline
As Gen Z viewers and other viewer demos increasingly flip for vertical video, whether in original microdramas, or M&E or sports clips rendered vertically on social platforms, verticalized streaming and VOD content is going mainstream in ways that are both surprising and predictable. It’s surprising in the sense that most of the videos we watch weren’t shot, produced, or initially edited with vertical consumption in mind, but also predictable simply because of the quantities of videos consumed on mobile devices that we most often hold and view vertically.
As good as vertically positioned handheld devices might feel in our hands, vertically reconfigured and repurposed video often looks terrible because of the haphazard way the frame is chopped and the visual content that was sacrificed in the process. Of course, not everything that appeared on screen in clipped shows and movies actually matters, and a resourceful editor could certainly recut most clips for vertical delivery in a way that retains the important bits and preserves the coherence of the story. But the prospect of meeting the exploding demand for vertical clipping of vast content libraries with human editors is not only daunting but cost-prohibitive and practically impossible.
Ateliere Storyline, a new component of Ateliere’s Connect supply chain solution enters the verticalization breach with an AI-based tool designed to automate the process of verticalizing and serializing long-form content libraries at scale in a way that recognizes the content’s essential elements at both the frame and the story level. This Q&A with Ateliere president and COO Flavius Goman explores how Ateliere Storyline tackles high-volume content verticalization, including meeting the challenges of conscientious frame-cropping (especially for complex and high-action scenes), manual review, the story interpretation involved in compelling automated serialization, and how this technology might be used outside of a strictly entertainment context.
Flavius Goman, President & COO, Ateliere Creative Technologies
What market shift led Ateliere to develop Storyline?
We're seeing a fundamental shift in how audiences consume video. Increasingly, engagement is happening on mobile devices through short-form, vertical, serialized experiences rather than traditional long-form viewing. At the same time, organizations are sitting on vast libraries of valuable video content that was originally created for television, streaming, training, education, or enterprise use.
The challenge is that repurposing those libraries for mobile-first platforms has traditionally required significant manual editing, review, and packaging. Ateliere Storyline was developed to help organizations capitalize on this shift by automatically transforming existing long-form assets into vertical, serialized content at scale, unlocking new audiences and monetization opportunities from content they already own.
How should customers think about Storyline — is it AI, workflow automation, or a broader content transformation capability?
It's best viewed as a content transformation capability powered by automation and intelligent content analysis.
AI plays an important role, but customers aren't buying a point AI tool. They're adopting a scalable workflow that analyzes content, identifies logical segmentation points, reformats video for vertical consumption, and generates platform-ready outputs automatically.
Storyline combines automation, cloud-scale processing, and intelligent decision-making within the broader Ateliere Connect ecosystem. Because it is built on Ateliere's cloud-native architecture, Storyline can operate across large content libraries and integrate directly into existing media supply chain workflows. This allows customers to transform, package, and deliver content at scale without introducing separate tools or manual processes.
What parts of the long-form-to-vertical workflow does Storyline automate?
Storyline automates the most labor-intensive portions of the process, including:
- Content analysis
- Identification of natural breakpoints
- Segmentation into episodic or serialized content
- Vertical formatting and reframing
- Output generation
- Packaging and processing across large libraries in parallel
The goal is to minimize manual review, cropping, editing, and packaging steps that have traditionally made large-scale content repurposing impractical.
Why is verticalizing long-form content more complex than simply cropping a horizontal frame?
Simply cropping a 16:9 image into a 9:16 frame often removes critical visual information. Long-form content was originally composed for a widescreen viewing experience, where directors intentionally use the full frame to tell the story.
Effective verticalization requires understanding what matters in a scene, preserving context, maintaining visual continuity, and ensuring viewers don't lose important narrative elements. It's a content interpretation and transformation challenge that must be performed consistently across thousands of assets. That's why automation and intelligent analysis become essential at scale.
How does Storyline handle more complex scenes where important action may be happening across the frame?
Storyline uses content analysis to evaluate the scene and determine how best to optimize it for vertical viewing while maintaining the integrity of the original content. The objective isn't simply to crop the image, but to create a viewing experience that preserves key story elements and audience engagement.
For customers with large libraries, the ability to apply those decisions consistently and automatically across thousands of titles is just as important as the individual transformation itself.
How does Storyline identify natural breakpoints when turning long-form content into serialized segments?
Storyline analyzes content structure to identify logical transition points that can serve as episode boundaries. Rather than creating arbitrary cuts based on duration alone, it looks for natural narrative breaks that allow content to be repackaged into serialized experiences suitable for mobile-first consumption.
This enables organizations to create episodic content from existing long-form libraries without requiring editors to manually review and segment every asset.
Can publishers configure segment length, output format, and versioning rules for different platforms or audiences?
Yes, Storyline is designed to support platform-specific publishing requirements. Different platforms, audiences, and use cases often require unique content lengths, aspect ratios, formatting specifications, and distribution versions.
Because Storyline operates within the Ateliere Connect environment, organizations can establish rules and workflows that align transformed content with their publishing and distribution strategies, helping ensure outputs are optimized for the destination platform and audience.
Why is Ateliere’s cloud-native architecture important for scaling this capability across large libraries?
Scale is the key challenge. While transforming a single video is relatively straightforward, transforming thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of assets requires a fundamentally different architecture. Customers often have extensive libraries that can be repurposed for mobile consumption, and manual approaches simply don't scale.
Ateliere Connect was built cloud-native from the ground up, enabling parallel processing across large content libraries and allowing organizations to automate transformation workflows across massive catalogs. This is consistent with the same cloud-scale architecture Ateliere has deployed for major content owners managing tens of thousands of assets globally.
How does Storyline apply beyond traditional Media & Entertainment use cases?
The shift toward mobile-first video isn't limited to entertainment. Virtually every industry is now using video as a primary communication medium.
Organizations across education, healthcare, government, enterprise communications, retail, training, live events, and faith-based communities face the same challenge: they have large libraries of valuable content that was not originally created for modern mobile consumption. Storyline helps them transform and extend the value of those assets without rebuilding content from scratch.
Where might Storyline fit in areas like sports, enterprise video, education, training, healthcare, or government content?
Storyline helps organizations maximize the value of existing video libraries by transforming long-form content into mobile-friendly and social-ready experiences. It enables teams to quickly create short-form clips optimized for platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and other digital channels. Specific use cases include:
- Sports: Repurpose games and events into highlights and short-form content.
- Enterprise: Turn town halls, webinars, and executive communications into engaging mobile formats.
- Education & Training: Convert lectures and training programs into bite-sized learning modules.
- Healthcare: Repackage patient education and clinical training content for easier consumption.
- Government: Transform public briefings, meetings, and informational content into accessible, audience-friendly segments.
Across all sectors, Storyline enables organizations to extend audience reach, improve engagement, and create new distribution opportunities without the cost and complexity of manual re-editing.
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