Format for treatment??

To all you screen writers out there, is there a website that teaches the proper way to draft a treatment? I'm sure theres no way I'd get it considered since I dont have an agent or anything but I figured what the hell!!


Any advice is welcomed...

What'cha writing? NIGHT OF THE DEAD DEMOCRAT? EVIL LIBS IV?

Why would I do that????

Caelia, are you trolling my forum?

Ahem ...


(sorry)

But why troll me at all??

To add something constructive: you can download movie scripts from the web. Just google 'screenplays'. Here's a link: http://www.screenplays-online.de/ (in English).

There's also software to help you format the things (and more). I think that Dramatica is the prime product, but there must be others.

Dramatica is not so much for fomatting as it is for nailing down the elements of your story's structure -- though for that, it is iindeed excellent once you get past the learning curve. For formatting, I recommend Final Draft.

Okay treatments.... where to begin.

The correct answer to what's the correct format for a treatment is - how long is a piece of string?

The fact is different producers and different production companies want different things.

Treatments for screenplays can be sales documents and they can also be work tools. The best advice I can give is try and cover all your bases, which means writing two or three for the same project of different lengths.

Firstly you want you slug line to sum up your story in 25 words or less. Less than 12 is better. These documents are also for the suits and bean counters, so artistry goes out the window. It really is a case of somewhere clearly stating this is for example "love and redemption" and "Shakespeare in Love meets Road Trip" These people have limited time and even more limited attention spans. They have just a few seconds in which to judge something and they need a concept they can zone in on.

Your first treatment should be 2-3 pages in length, include your beginning, middle and end, the main character developments and plot twists, and in all that try to be entertaining.

The next treatment should be around 10 pages and is the same thing but in more details including incidental characters and maybe more dialogue.

There is a larger treament called a beat sheet that can be anywhere up to 30/40 pages. These are all the story beats from beginning to end with practically every scene mapped out for timing and structural purposes. I doubt anyone will ask for that up front.

All outlines tend to be single spaced 12 point courier with line breaks between paragraphs to denote shift in story focus and no indentation of paragraphs.

That's about all you need to know.

Any old word processing package will do.

For screenplay writing use Final Draft 7 or Screenwriter 2000. FD7 has become more standard now and I use that a lot more now than I did.

^Thanks. Was hoping you'd respond to this, since it's not my area of expertise.

Between you, me and the world, I don't think it's anyone's area of expertise since just about every place seems to have their own way of doing things.

What I've outlined is about as generic as it gets so the person putting it together won't look like an outsider when they submit.

Looney is wise on these issues

I can't help feeling that it's a little too bad that Screenwriter seems to have lost the battle to Final Draft. I wrote the original drafts of the Challengers pilot in Screenwriter, which I find to be far more elegant. But when it came time for budgeting and a production draft, I had to convert to Final Draft. The next two episodes that I had to write to fulfill the contract were written in Final Draft from page 1. But then, I use a Mac. What do I know?

If anyone has Dramatica Pro, you might be interested to know that it turns out a fairly decent working version of a treatment, at least.