TREATMENT

TREATMENT

We have now spent lesson time discussing and planning your films, with discussions about the outline treatment. Once I have given you the green light, you can start work.
IN CLASS Your job is to write an entry for your Production Log on your film treatment.  

Title is 7/12/15 PLANNING  FILM TREATMENT 
(Email me by the end of the lesson with title and header as usual)
 
A treatment is a description in clear English in the present tense setting out what your film has in it, starting at the beginning in the case of a film opening which has a linear narrative.
With thanks to the writer of the guidelines below, found HERE
HERE is an exemplar  which is good although it doesn't follow these guidelines 

Practical Guidelines for Writing FILM Treatments

     

The FIRST TIME your CHARACTERS appear in the treatment, try to do all three things listed below in one sentence:
1. Include their FIRST AND LAST NAMES IN CAPS:
CONSTANTINE GRUBER. (Don’t capitalize or use their full names again unless they enter the story much later and we need to be reminded who they are, like CURLY in Chinatown.)

2. Include the character’s age as a simple numeral set off by commas (JERROL BURBLE, 29, a hairy man with a mole in his eyebrow like a baby June bug . . .) A numeral (13) saves you and the reader time and space.

3. Include a brief but surprising description of the character:

• Don’t write a general description that gives your value judgments about the character (beautiful, ugly, cranky, goofy, racist); such adjectives tell and don’t show;

• Don’t write a boring all-points-bulletin (5’ 4” with brown eyes and hair); but instead

• Choose two or three significant details that give us a vivid picture of the character immediately: a pear-shaped man with a strawberry nose and a weepy, open sore on his leg. (This description, something like the one Chaucer uses in “The Cook’s Tale,” vividly shows the alcoholic cook in Canterbury Tales. The strawberry nose shows us he drinks too much and the open sore strikes us as grotesque and unsanitary, especially since the cook keeps picking at his sore while he cooks meals.)

• Here’s an example of a sentence that uses all three elements: “JOSEPHINE (JO) CRUPKI, 73, enters the living room in her granddaughter’s red miniskirt, wild-eyed, looking like a skeleton dipped in latex.”  Hard to forget this description, right?

• Write scenes in specific places and times with clear transitions from scene to scene: “The next day,” “Two weeks later,” “After burying the body,” for example.

• Write only what we can see or hear. Don’t tell us character’s thoughts or motivations. Have the characters tell other characters what they’re thinking and reveal their motives through their dialogue and actions.

• Don’t write “we see” or “we hear.” Keep us out of the treatment and script altogether. If you write, “We see Jo pulling a revolver from her cleavage,” simply rewrite the sentence as, “Jo pulls a Colt 45 from her cleavage.”

• Every time a character makes or hears a sound, CAPITALIZE that SOUND: “Jo BLOWS out the television screen with a SHATTERING GUNSHOT.”

• Don’t write camera directions. We just want to see and hear the story as it unfolds dramatically like a film in our minds. The more vivid and brief the descriptions, the better.