mirkoscrapbookdiary

[mirkoscrapbookdiary]

White Valley Creation process and the challenge i faced (as the writer)

Hello, doves!

Like the title suggests, I want to talk about the challenges of creating and writing a webtoon. It took me a while to be able to write my webtoon. It's always been a dream of mine, and with the Webtoon Legends contest coming closer, I wanted to share me and my partner's experience in writing the webtoon we made.

The first challenge is the creation of the story itself. Conceptualization is the hardest phase in any project, but it's especially challenging when creating a webtoon, considering that the story is what people come to see. If it's a flop, we wouldn't really be making a profit from it. Not only that, but the flow of the story and how it's written can really mess up the drawing phase. Writing a script is very different from writing a story—the way dialogue works and how it's structured are also different. Storyboarding for a webtoon versus storyboarding for film is also distinct. Though similar in style, we have to take note of how the camera moves in film, while in webtoons we keep in mind the spacing and transitions of the panels from one to another. All of this helped me immensely when writing for our webtoon, considering it follows mostly the same structure and elements.

Having a background in both film and theater made conceptualizing these aspects easier to imagine, but that brings me to my next problem. Webtoons, though similar to comics in some ways, differ significantly in how they're made and paced, especially since we're creating this with the purpose of scrolling down rather than being published side by side like comics or manga. The pacing can be determined by the amount of space between panels, and transitions between panels can create a great effect. For example, in our webtoon, we created a panel where blood drips from the main character's cleaver, transitioning into a henchman of the main villain.

Paneling is very important in webtoons—it can make or break your project in many cases. Time management is another major challenge my partner and I faced; being both in college with short attention spans made it difficult to carve out time for this project. That's why we agreed that if we had time to hang out together, we would work on the story or draw it. To avoid burnout, we made sure to regularly take breaks when needed.

Now, for illustrating the webtoon, we had to decide on an overall theme before we wrote it. "White Valley," our webtoon, primarily focuses on symbolism using the seasons as a metaphor for how time flies, with each arc having different color palettes, logos, and typography. Deciding on the art style can also determine how popular it will be; creating a unique style that makes it stand out is key to crafting a good webtoon.

Marketing is another consideration and challenge we're facing since neither of us is well-known for our art or writing. This makes marketing our webtoon harder, but our solution is to provide little teasers of the story to engage viewers. Everyone will face different challenges when writing or illustrating their webtoon, but knowing when to take breaks and loving the story you're creating is crucial for people to see and enjoy it. A quote that stuck with me was said by Ginjaninjaowo in their video about rewriting a five-year project called "Prism": "I want to be able to write a story that I want to tell."

Drawings by: slnillust (twitter)