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WHAT IS A TREATMENT?
A treatment is essentially a breakdown of your movie that runs anywhere from a page or two to twenty pages (or even more, depending on the density of the script). A treatment is a blueprint for a screenplay. In essences a treatment is a Short Story.
The story is told in detail stage-by-stage as it unfolds. This does everything that a synopsis and an outline do and a lot more. It reveals the full story and its structure, and shows the main and secondary characters their personalities, relationships, and how they change and develop.
Treatments have different functions: a writer may compose a highly detailed treatment in preparation for the first draft, but this will have to be scaled down to meet requirements of busy producers and development execs... ideal length: 6 to 12 pages.
HOW DO I WRITE A TREATMENT?
- Recommended fonts: Courier 12-point OR Times New Roman 12-point.
- Title: Centred and emboldened.
- Log line (if appropriate): Centred beneath title.
- Tense: Always present tense.
- Dialogue: None, except if you wish to give key phrases to characters to bring them alive and highlight their philosophy so as to take on life and/or to use sparingly to break up dense prose.
- Style: Concise, vivid, evocative; active verbs; avoid adverbs where possible; keep the text simple and visual. AVOID: strings of adjectives, reported speech, flowery metaphors, abstract language, heavy chunks of exposition, camera directions.
- Length: Treatments vary enormously in length 6 to 12 pages is normal, but writers may develop a much more detailed treatment up to 40 to 50 pages for their own benefits. For the industry shorter is preferred certainly as an initial selling document.
- Ratio: If your script is 100 pages and your treatment is 10 pages, then 1 page of treatment = 10 pages/minutes of script. Keep to this proportion as a guide.
- Rewrite-Rewrite-Rewrite: As with your script, you need to do a number of drafts of your treatment. With each draft concentrate on cutting away all unnecessary detail and making the story as vivid and engaging as possible. LESS is MORE!
WHY DO I NEED A TREATMENT?
- Initially, as a device for the writer to organize their thoughts and develop the texture of a script.
- Later, as a selling document used to sell your story to a producer and/or agent, which is a treatment’s major function.
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