Chapter 7
Chapter 7
This Would Be a Massive Hit If They Broadcasted It Like This
“Make your expression a little nastier. Sharper eyes. Imagine your best friend approaching you smugly after secretly kissing your boyfriend behind your back.”
“But I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“No, Hyejin. I’m telling you to imagine it. Use your imagination!”
“I’ve never liked a guy before, so I don’t know how I’m supposed to imagine that.”
“Ugh, my head…”
Right now, I was watching the acting lesson together with Team 3 Leader Jo Woonseok.
Jo Woonseok smiled proudly like a father obsessed with his daughter.
“She’s really soft and innocent, right?”
“She really is.”
“But once she actually gets on set, she completely transforms. She’s talented, and her visuals are excellent too. The company’s investing heavily in her because she’s a promising prospect.”
Even now, she was so pretty it left me speechless.
A few more years and she’d probably become genuinely dazzling.
“I think she could even surpass actress Cha Seoyoon’s fame someday.”
“You really think so?”
I’d only responded half politely and half sincerely without thinking too much about it,
but Team Leader Jo Woonseok suddenly looked very serious.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“Well, when a totem overflowing with good fortune says something like that, it’s hard to ignore.”
This guy.
He really did bring me beside Hwang Hyejin because he genuinely thought I was some kind of lucky charm.
“You really don’t know anything else about the 30THC channel?”
“No. Even the acquaintance I know doesn’t really tell me much.”
“So their office is probably in Korea?”
“My acquaintance mentioned a few times that going to work every day and working alone there gets really boring.”
“Anyway, your acquaintance isn’t actually part of the CG department, right?”
“Yeah. I only heard they work in data management. That’s why I thought of asking them about recovery in the first place.”
That should create enough distance.
For now, it was better to keep 30THC hidden safely inside WeTube.
Still, when were commission offers finally going to arrive?
Judging by the way Team Leader Jo Woonseok talked, it sounded like he wanted to outsource something himself.
“Team Leader, are you maybe planning to commission them for something?”
“Mm, nothing’s confirmed yet.”
I didn’t ask further.
Even though Team Leader Jo Woonseok treated me like some special lucky totem, I was still just a rookie employee.
While running errands to buy drinks and snacks, I checked the video production community site.
I’d been so busy all day I hadn’t had time to check the users’ reactions.
Specifically, their reactions to the black-and-white animated storyboard video I made based on an aspiring writer’s screenplay I’d enjoyed reading.
‘Why are there so many notifications?’
I absentmindedly opened the notification tab and got startled.
Hundreds of new comment notifications had piled up.
Turns out my post had proudly reached the number one spot on the site’s best posts.
Getting first place on a major community site.
I was touched.
Honestly, it felt just as exciting and thrilling as surpassing twenty million total views on WeTube.
My heart pounding, I started checking the reactions.
└So you were an animation art director
└Amazing. Respect.
└No but seriously, how did you produce something this high-quality only a few hours after the original screenplay got uploaded?
└The speed honestly feels impossible unless you literally just clicked a button. How is the quality this insane?
Sharp bastard mixed in there.
How did he figure out I literally brain-clicked everything using a 30th-century video app?
└If you’re this much of a veteran pro, why was the screenplay you uploaded earlier such a disaster
└Because he’s an animation director, not a scriptwriter?
└Are you really an art director? Not just some animation staff member?
└Judging by the video quality, he’s absolutely a top-level professional. No ordinary staff member could do this.
└Reading a screenplay, visualizing it completely in your head, then turning that into a moving storyboard animation…
And this guy supposedly did it all alone within a few hours.
No ordinary staff member could ever pull that off.
I wanted to keep reading more reactions,
but I was still out running errands, so I decided to continue later after getting home.
I bought a huge pile of drinks and snacks before returning to the van.
Hwang Hyejin sat by the middle window seat inside the van, deeply focused on reading a script.
The edges were already worn and frayed from how many times she’d read it,
and the pages were covered in handwritten analysis notes.
But what project was it?
Now I was curious.
“Doyoung, are you suddenly interested in Hyejin’s acting projects?”
Guess I’d leaned my head over too obviously.
Team Leader Jo Woonseok snickered while asking, and I awkwardly pulled my neck back.
“I was just impressed by how seriously she’s analyzing it.”
“Our Hyejin’s pretty, talented, and hardworking too.”
“…No. Any aspiring actor would work this hard.”
“Why are you calling her an aspiring actor? She’s already a proper rookie actress.”
Hwang Hyejin had already secured casting for her debut drama.
Apparently she’d been cast as the female lead’s high school version.
“So what do you think? Does it seem like she’ll do well?”
“…I don’t really know, but I hope it succeeds. I’ll pray for it every day with a bowl of water beside me.”
“Just pray in your heart. No need to go through the trouble of setting out water too.”
That’s what he said,
but the pleased smile on his face seemed to say, “Tap water doesn’t count.”
Maybe I should set Samdasoo bottled water beside me and use that as my profile picture.
“But Team Leader oppa, why are you asking Doyoung oppa things like that?”
Hwang Hyejin’s eyes sparkled brightly.
It wasn’t an interrogating tone at all.
More like a little girl innocently asking, “Why is the sun in the sky?”
She felt like an actress whose entire body overflowed with bright, positive energy.
‘Video app, stories starring her are suddenly flooding into my head right now. Should I try making one?’
【Permission is required when creating content based on a real person’s likeness.】
I know, I know.
The developer’s internal production ethics policy.
I was just joking because looking at Hwang Hyejin suddenly made inspiration explode inside me and I momentarily felt like some film director.
“Anyway, you heard about the fire at WISH’s studio this morning, right?”
“Yes. I heard the footage almost got destroyed but was barely saved.”
“That was all thanks to Doyoung.”
“Really? What did Doyoung oppa do?”
“Well, you see…”
We’d only met today, yet she was already calling me oppa.
A ridiculously pretty girl calling me oppa definitely felt nice.
“Wow. That’s amazing. Seriously amazing.”
“From the company’s perspective, we were incredibly lucky. The WISH girls were seriously relieved too.”
“Looks like they properly got their bad luck out of the way.”
“Exactly. Since they got through such a huge disaster right from the start, I think this new album will succeed too.”
Hwang Hyejin looked at me with her large deer-like eyes and smiled brightly.
“I hope I can absorb lots of good energy from you too, Doyoung oppa, so my drama succeeds.”
“That’s exactly why I brought him onto our team. Good job, right?”
“Yes! Great job!”
She really was a character overflowing with bright energy from head to toe.
Just sitting near her somehow made my own heart feel cleaner too.
Without realizing it, I glanced toward the script again,
and Team Leader Jo Woonseok immediately noticed.
“Want to see an extra copy of the script?”
“Huh? Ah, no, it’s okay.”
“What do you mean no? You literally said you were interested in video work. That’s why I lured you over here in the first place.”
Team Leader Jo Woonseok pulled a fresh script from the storage compartment and handed it to me.
“Only four episodes are available so far, but give it a read. Then tell us what kind of impression you got.”
I suddenly felt awkward about the road manager driving the van.
As the newest member, I was basically being treated more importantly than someone senior to me.
I glanced through the rearview mirror, but he seemed uninterested in me and focused entirely on the road ahead.
Hwang Hyejin also looked at me expectantly.
Two pairs of eyes sincerely hoping I’d read the script.
I cleared my throat and opened it.
This was my very first time reading an actual drama script.
The moment I began reading—
【Registered model Hwang Hyejin has agreed to creative use of her data.】
【Converting the script into video form.】
【Other roles will be generated freely according to the writer’s intended image.】
Huh?
A massive screen suddenly appeared before my eyes.
[Winter Castle]
[Episode 1]
A drama that hadn’t even begun filming yet,
a drama that currently existed only as a script,
was now playing directly before my eyes.
【Accelerating time perception for efficient viewing.】
I could feel it.
Time flowed incredibly slowly for everyone except me and the video app.
Freed from normal time entirely,
I watched the drama unfold across the massive screen visible only to me.
A drama instantly produced by the video app based solely on the script’s contents.
Everything was perfect.
Beautiful scenery.
Hwang Hyejin’s pure, innocent beauty.
Fictional characters generated by the video app itself, delivering flawless performances perfectly matched to Hwang Hyejin.
I finished all four episodes in an instant.
Unconsciously, even my hands had started flipping through the physical script pages in sync with the drama’s flow.
According to the script, Hwang Hyejin only appeared until Episode 2.
Near the end of Episode 2, when the story shifted into adulthood, the actual main actress appeared.
But…
In the video I was watching now, a twenty-eight-year-old mature Hwang Hyejin appeared instead.
The youthful image was gone.
In its place stood a mature, confident woman with sharp, determined eyes.
A version of Hwang Hyejin nobody in the world had seen yet—
a beautiful grown woman ten years in the future—
performing breathtaking acting opposite fictional characters generated by the app.
The instantly generated drama ended.
“…”
I couldn’t say anything.
From beginning to end, everything about it was perfect and beautiful.
I wasn’t even sure whether the script itself was good.
The visuals alone had simply been too beautiful.
Still, if they tried filming at the quality level I just saw, the production budget would probably become impossible to handle.
Even the Cha Seoyoon polar bear video had professionals praising it as something worth burning hundreds of millions of won per second on.
“Doyoung, you looked really immersed while reading. The story must’ve been genuinely good?”
“Well… imagining how actress Hwang Hyejin would perform the role made it much easier to get immersed.”
“You imagined Hyejin acting while reading it? And it helped you immerse yourself more?”
Team Leader Jo Woonseok’s voice sounded strangely meaningful somehow,
but I didn’t want to leave the lingering emotions I was feeling right now.
【Please remember that this video was generated by the app based on the script.】
【Naturally, the actual filmed version will be completely different from this.】
Ah…
If they broadcasted it exactly like this, it’d become an enormous hit.
Seriously, it feels way too wasteful for me alone to watch something this high-quality…