Introduction
A treatment is a synopsis or summary of a TV show or film. It includes a breakdown of the story, characters, locations, themes and tone of the production. The purpose of compiling all of this important information into one document is to help pitch or advertise the idea to producers or buyers.
The Key Elements of a Treatment
There are many important components in a treatment:
- Title
- Names and contact information of producers and writers
- Logline
- Synopsis
- Key Characters
- Mood boards
- Target Audience
Loglines
A logline is a sentence which summarises the screenplay of a film or TV show.
The key Elements of a Logline
- Main Character/s
- Setting
- Central Conflict
- Antagonist
For example:
“A group of survivors struggle to escape from a revolutionary wildlife park filled with dinosaurs after a bribed employee sabotages the dinosaur’s enclosures.”
Here, you can break this logline for the movie Jurassic Park down into each 4 of those key elements.
Synopsis
A synopsis is like a lengthened logline, but with more detail. It is a document which describes the plot of a Film or TV show, and is usually several paragraphs, or a page of A4 in writing.
The Key Elements of a Synopsis
- One page of writing or less.
- Scene-by-scene break down.
- Present tense.
- Main characters.
- Relevant dialogue.
- Inclusion of necessary details only.
Character Profiles
Character profiles are the biographies of the main characters of a story (protagonists and antagonists). It includes their age, appearance, relationships, physical description and any other relevant details to their character.
A character profile helps the creators of a story to write about the character and their actions taking into account the most important information about them. It also helps the creators to pitch characters.
Production Formats
The production format of a film or TV show is the way that it is presented to the audience physically. This can be in the Cinema, on a streaming service like Netflix, on live TV channels, YouTube, Tiktok etc.
The audience for the production is considered when deciding on a production format for the story. It will likely effect how the film is produced, and which production companies may take the idea on to develop – for example, Netflix would not accept a film presented as Tiktok videos.
Some important things that may be affected by the production format of a film could be:
- The resolution
- Aspect ratio
- Time and narrative
- Post production
Practising Creating a Treatment
Last lesson, we came up with three rough ideas for a creative project for this brief. This practise treatment is for the first idea I came up with.