There’s an art to crafting a strong director’s treatment. Moreover, presenting strong writing wins work. Sure. But what does winning writing—specifically in the format of a director’s treatment—actually look like?
In this article we’ll be taking you through an overview of the elements necessary to create a winning pitch:
There's an Art to Creating a Winning Director's Treatment
What does a great director’s treatment look like. ‘Look like’ is definitely a good way to think of it. Like it or not, your words are destined to be squished around within a layout. So, think about the lengths of sentences. The overall shape of paragraphs. Particularly important is the peppering of paragraph breaks. Remember, writing’s a visual medium, so make your words have a pleasing shape. Keep the sentences concise. Obviously, try not to pack more than one idea into each one.
Basically, we’ve rounded up a few tips and tricks of various techniques and easy go-to techniques that constantly help us create winning pitches. Furthermore, we hope these help you on your journey to create better and more creative treatments of your own no matter what medium.
Useful Everyday Tips
Get a Plan
There are only so many relevant adjectives. Thus, you’re gonna need to pepper them judiciously. The thing being, when you start writing without a good plan—ideally in bullet point form—there can be a tendency to say it all in the TONE section. Which isn’t a bad thing, however, it just tends to make the other sections feel repetitive. Accordingly, having a plan helps keep you on track and stops different sections spilling into each other.
First, start with the headings, then boil down the key points below them. One common tendency, for better or worse, is to then have subsections. Sometimes even subsections of subsections. Problem is, this quickly gets a bit dry.
Instead—even within this planning phase—try injecting one or more of those key adjectives into the PUNCHY SECTION HEADING.
Make it snappy
Overall, a more clipped and conversational flow in a director’s treatment is gonna sound much better when presented anyway. The read out-loud test is a particularly good indicator of boringness and bad-tempo. So, use it every time.
Also, strong writing doesn’t f*rt around. The exception however being comedy—there it’s the-more-farts-the-better. There’s strength and clarity in putting it plainly. This is especially true on a job where the other two directors might get granular and miss the point a bit.
Don't Bore Us, Get to the Chorus
Did you try putting the story right up front of your director’s treatment? You should. Then, slap an OVERVIEW or APPROACH section just before it, and you’re briskly leading the reader into what they’re actually going to get for their money. That’s what they primarily care about most.
Try running analytics on your online treatments. It’s alarming how surprisingly quickly people breeze through the pages. So, write your treatment with that mind. Make sure the pertinent bits leap out at them.
Obviously, you want to pack the headings with meaning. But, keep them terse. And please don’t punish your layout person during the project with long-winded headings.
Think carefully about the first paragraph. Firstly, see if you can encapsulate the rest of the section in a punchy preamble. Sometimes it can be as simple as THREE – CAPITALIZED – ADJECTIVES. Often this achieves the best results and looks great on the page.
Also, right at the end, go back through the director’s treatment and think about which sentences work best as pullout quotes. Lastly, give them an extra tighten.
Plus...
Use Bullet Points
- Best used to quickly plan out the treatment writing
- Ideally nowhere in the final words
Be Authentic
This is by far the most genuinely bandied about adjective in director’s treatments. Make sure the writing sounds like you. Then, read it aloud and check it.
Make Use of Quotes
Quotes can look nice at the start of a treatment. But searching for them can be a bit of a time-suck. Plus, they aren’t the thing that’ll specifically win you the work, so be a bit careful.
Read it Out Loud
The read out-loud test is a particularly good indicator of boringness and bad-tempo. A bad director’s treatment will be noticed as soon as it’s read out loud.
The Sections of a Director's Treatment
The Intro
This is where that authenticity needs to land squarely. It always helps to sound genuinely appreciative and enthused, but without making big fuss of it or feeling phony.
More importantly, this is where you show them that you GET THE IDEA. Better yet, if you can encapsulate the strength of the idea and connect that with your strengths as a filmmaker, you’re off to a good start.
As a rule of thumb, keep your intro section short. It’s tempting for this first section to sprawl into more of an overview, but that can easily tire out your reader before they’ve even begun to digest the director’s treatment.
Story Preamble
Here’s your chance to brace them for the changes and suggestions, while reminding them you’re a collaborative type and it’s not set in stone.
Taking them Through the Story
There are no fixed rules here, other than making sure you aren’t repeating their script word-for-word.
One trick to grab those skim-reading eyeballs is to sparingly use ALL CAPS for EMPHASIS or when you introduce a NEW CHARACTER. It makes your director’s treatment feel a little more like a screenplay, without needing all those scene headings.
Dialogue generally looks better like this:
Character Name
The things they say.
The main thing though—keep it moving. It’s up to you how much technical detail you want to include, but if this section has the treatment’s most daunting ‘text-cliffs’ you need to consider some excavations.
Campaigns with a plethora of scripts
This is where it pays to carefully plan exactly how detailed you’re going to be in each script. It can also mean being a lot more terse with certain other sections to avoid a bloated director’s treatment.
Cutdowns
It can be particularly painful for readers (and layout artists) to have to slog through multiple shorter versions of the story. Sometimes it’s a necessary evil, but if not, try and avoid it. Ideally, if these scripts are mostly straight cutdowns, they can be discussed in broader terms.
The Music Conundrum
Great music refs and bespoke playlist usually don’t hurt—but they are maybe not as much of a game-changer as you might think. If you have a strong take on it, sure, spend a bunch of time here curating a bespoke playlist. If not, speak to the music (and the soundscape) with your words.
Post Production
This section often takes many forms and just as often sprawls into multiple subsections. That’s because each script is so vastly different. For example – if VFX is important to the storytelling, then provide it its own special section. Likewise GFX and color grading.
The Outro
The most boring of sections, and quite likely to be the least consequential. Keep it snappy. Payoff a joke or idea you set up earlier. Say thanks again. Sum up the approach. Sound excited.
In General Avoid These
Stunt Treatments
Every now and again, for any number of reasons, the winning director’s treatment throws the rules right out the window. Stunt treatments can be a great way to stand out. But use them wisely. Usually, they work best when the visuals allow for it.
"Mini" Treatments
Ah, the cursed mini treatment. It’s a baffling mystery how these seem to have just as many words as a ‘normal’ director’s treatment. They’re just much more hastily assembled. The mini treatment is a great example of when it might be worth getting a ghostwriter to crystalize your vision. Likewise, it could be a good idea to get a researcher to help you find the perfect references to illustrate your vision.
With mini treatments, it’s all about trimming the fluff, which is something you should be doing as a brutal edit pass on your writing anyway. Think about getting a bit more bullet-point-like in your writing.
Repeating yourself
The trick being – go terse and crystalized up-front, then lean into DETAILS later in the treatment. You don’t need to keep reminding them it’s authentic, just show them HOW. This also is where visuals and moving reference play a huge role.
Don't click them out of the story
Resist the urge to link to a long video in your director’s treatment—and if you must, make sure you embed it within the layout. If you must link to Youtube, there’s a trick to linking to a full screen version without pre-roll. Where possible, get your layout artists to use GIFs instead.
Find Sophistication
Write With Layout Pages In Mind
You might try planning you writing structure in Keynote or InDesign. It can be a help and a hinderance. The obvious risk becomes soaking up writing time fiddling with fonts, but if you’re doing the layout yourself too, why not?
The visuals Inform Your Writing
Likewise, try to roughly guess how many pages the writing’s likely to sprawl across. Keep in mind where the strengths of the visual reference is likely to be. Is there an unreasonably bulky section that doesn’t naturally match any of you imagery? Shorten it.
Feeling Daunted?
If you are feeling daunted at the thought of writing a director’s treatment, or just want to try a new ghostwriter, get in touch. We can help bring your ideas to life in the form of a stunning pitch deck. The Collective Pitch represents writers, researchers, designers, and mood reel editors. We work with directors and production companies from all over the world. Let’s work together and win you that work.
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