In the South Korean content industry, the webtoon market has become a core of the intellectual property industry. The heated competition of the OTT platform has made the web novel and webtoon genres emerge as representative K-content in the industry. ...
In the South Korean content industry, the webtoon market has become a core of the intellectual property industry. The heated competition of the OTT platform has made the web novel and webtoon genres emerge as representative K-content in the industry. The visualization in various media, based on a webtoon, is being accelerated: the limitless imagination of digital text webtoons, which have relatively few restrictions and limitations regarding expression and are easy to realize the fantasy world, is a rich repository of making new video contents showing great potential.
This study mulled over the media conversion strategy of webtoons, focusing on the TVN drama <Tale of Fairy> and the movie <The Mimic> based on Korean webtoons. In addition, the strategies were presented to enable derivative works to achieve successful transmedia storytelling. With the OTT market expansion, domestic content creators are no longer confined to terrestrial, general, and cable broadcasting systems. Rather, they are moving to global content enterprises such as Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney Plus. Therefore, the Korean drama production environment is experiencing various changes. In addition, analyzing and applying the factors of success and failure revealed in the media conversion process from the perspective of the content creator are indispensable for numerous media conversion works in the future.
Both <Tale of Fairy> and <The Mimic> are fantasy webtoons that deal with the fantasy of the world and exotic things. Therefore, when visualizing them, the producer should have first considered the characteristics of the converted medium and recreated the fantasy with perfect VFX special effects. However, the two works are rather disappointing because such tasks were not effectively delivered. Therefore, through this study, the following alternatives were suggested for what strategy should be pursued in terms of future media-conversion of fantasy webtoons. First, the right adaptation, reflecting the characteristics of the medium is necessary. Second, securing enough production time for the detailed VFX expression of the fantasy genre is necessary. Third, creating a subject consciousness and clearly showing a world view of the creator is necessary. Lastly, casting actors who can deliver great material, webtoon, or those who are suitable for the new media in the OTT era is necessary.