I almost thought I was defeated this week as I struggled to attack the process of writing up the Treatment for the short film I’m working on during this module.
The only other time I have ever written a treatment for a screenplay was nearly 13 years ago, if not more when I wrote my first ever feature. Looking back on it now I definitely had no idea what I was doing for I included photos in the Treatment - massive industry NO NO!
Thankfully this module is teaching me the correct way of writing one which I love for not only is it something I never knew how to do, it’s also very important in communicating the overall story of the film itself. When I wrote the first one I had written the script itself first, this time I’m having to approach it the other way round.
Write the Treatment before the script as it will help me stay on track when writing the script. I’ve been writing creatively for years now and this document was to be written in present tense third-person prose (the same way you would lay out a short story - paragraphs) had me stumped for days. All I needed to do was expand the Outline I had written the week before, alas my mind was boggled which started making me angry because I knew the story inside out and backwards, yet why was I finding it so hard?
To try and rectify the situation I logged in to my VLE and accessed the supporting documents in the Writer’s Toolkit. It looked so easy now that I had a sample format to follow. This format was a great starting point as I then looked at the document as a list of questions to answer: what is the film called? What genre is the film? What happens to the characters in the first, second and third acts?
Until this point, I had been thinking in a linear approach- A to B to C. I then decided to down tools for a day and play my Guitar instead as I was struggling with the timing of a song I am learning in my singing lessons. The answer came to me while I was navigating the Frets as it had been a while since I last played.
Everyone knows the Frets on a Guitar are numbered in a linear way from 1 right up to nearly 30 - depending on the Guitar. However, when you play a song on the guitar you don’t play the Frets in numerical order.
For example, with the song I was playing the Frets come in the following order: 0 3 0 3 1 0 2 1 2 0 2 4, 0 0 3 0 3 1 0 2 1 2 0 2 4. If you’re not a Guitarist, this is the first 2 lines from “Zombie” by The Cranberries and when you see a 0 it represents an open string.
By using that knowledge I thought that just because the Treatment is presented in a logical and linear fashion on paper, it didn’t mean I had to write it in that way. So, the following day I sat down and wrote the Treatment in the same way I navigated the Fretboard of my Guitar.
I wrote down the genre, followed by writing up what happened in Act 2, followed by Act 1, then Act 3 leaving the title till last.
For some reason, I find I sometimes work backwards when I get stuck but when I wrote the very first screenplay I attacked the beginning first, followed by the ending then went back and wrote the middle. Whereas, with the psychological thriller I’m developing I have started in the middle.