Just started drafting out a prose version of Screenplay #3, or a 'treatment' as it's called.
It's funny how it doesn't matter how long you spend looking at the plans and thinking about the design, it's not until you start digging the foundations that you really start to get a feel for how the house is going to look or what it's going to be like to live there. I've been mulling over this story for a few months now, but haven't really made much progress in terms of thinking about structure and character arcs and the like. Now that I've started writing the treatment, all that is becoming much clearer. Already scenes have been dropped, new ones added, and motivations explored. And I'm not even a whole page in yet.
In case you're curious, this one's a romcom. No zom. Absolutely no zom. But I do have Simon Pegg in mind for the lead.
Building work has begun
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Looks like someone has had as much problem getting to sleep as myself…
So explain to the uninitiated amongst us, what is a 'treatment'?
Yeah, lie-in was too long. 😉
A treatment is basically the story written out in prose, instead of being formatted like a proper script would be. Usually they're quite short – three to ten pages. They lack the descriptive prose element of a short story, though.
One way of writing a script is to write a basic three page treatment, then revise and expand it you've got the whole story down. Personally, I'm going for getting the whole thing down at once, and then revising until it reads right, then I'll write the script off that. The idea is that it's easier to revise a treatment than a screenplay (it's shorter for one thing) and that by the time you come to write the script, it will pretty much write itself.
We shall see what we shall see.
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