Film Treatment

In this post I am going to be talking about film treatments. A film treatment is a piece of work, typically the step between scene cards and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline and it may include details of directional style that an outline leaves out. Treatments read like a short story but are told in the present tense and describe events as they happen.

Here is an example of a film treatment made for a real film;

i Am Legend II Treatment by Emma on Scribd

A film treatment should;

• Have a clear title at the start stating the name of the film
• Includes important dialogue only
• When a new character is introduced it needs to be in capital letters, so we can clearly see when a new character has entered the plot
• For short films a treatment is generally laid out as a short story, however, longer films can be up to 60 pages long
• Some include little directions to show how the scene will be portrayed or shown in the film

This treatment for I am legend differs from our treatment because this one is much longer than ours because ours is a short film so it will only be about 2 pages long. This is because we are only doing a short film.

Below I am going to embed our own film treatment for our short film Grief;

Grief Treatment - Elisa Allen, Emma by elisa on Scribd


My next post will be the film script.