The Feature Film treatment
By Marta Ávila
Practical advice to write your feature film treatment
Recently, Filmarket Hub started accepting treatments as a previous version to the script of your project in development. Therefore, now seems to be a good time to go over the concept of “treatment”, as it’s something that is known for not having a set of established and rigid rules, so it can generate certain doubts about what its content and form should be.
The treatment is a long summary of the plot of a film project, explained in the way it wants to be told. It would be a mid point in the development of your story, more extensive than a synopsis but previous to the development of the actual script.
Style
The treatment for a feature film is formed by the description of the action that develops throughout the story, from beginning to end. It’s usually written in the present and in the third person, though it might include dialogues in an indirect style and always in quotation marks.
It should be as most visual as possible, without including narrative technicalities (for instance, act division), but, as long as it is vital to explain the action described, you can add some film technicalities (like camera movements). Also, it is important that with each new character introduced it’s name appears all in caps, including a brief description of him or her. You should also start to mark where the action will take place, which will help to start getting an idea of the type of budget we’re talking about. In essence, your treatment should detail where and how the narration will evolve, who are the characters participating in it and what’s the relation between them.
This type of document is usually written with a simple spacing, leaving at the end of each paragraph an extra space. The style should be concise and evocative, usually using verbs and avoiding chains of adjectives.
Basic types of treatment:
Fundamentally, there’s two basic types of treatment, depending around what they are being articulated:
- Via action junctions: in a similar style to a tale, the story is told via succession of paragraphs, which not necessarily correspond to acts or sequences.
- Via sequences: in this case, sequences that are going to be developed in the script are marked from the start of the treatment, usually preceded by a header. This allows to visualize more clearly the structure of the story and to note down production needs.
In any case, the treatment will describe the action in a concise way, including only those details that are significant to the plot or which will contribute to create the tone of the story.
Film treatments are usually around 25–45 pages, in which you include the presentation of the project, the action sequences, the turning points of the plot and the resolution.
Summarizing, this work document, can be even used as a selling point, contributes to develop and structure the story, therefore, it is the moment in which you can allow yourself to incorporate jumps in time from a first draft, which will probably be written in chronological order.
Finally, when we take the step to turn our treatment into an actual script, we will be forced to simplify, because in essence, scripts show the main characters “doing things”.
You can read more about literary scripts and its different formats in other posts we have here at Film Academy.
Let’s go step by step, what are you waiting for to start developing your treatment?
