ScreenLab: Exciting Treatments

ScreenLab: Exciting Treatments

Your story treatments are vitally important both for developing and for marketing your scripts, and writing a good treatment lies at the very heart of good screenwriting; and yet the treatment is where most writers go wrong.

This workshop will teach you to write a strong and involving film, TV one-off or series treatment, using clips, analysis, sample treatments and thought-provoking exercises.

You'll receive top quality examples to read and practical advice on writing your own, including feedback on your own treatment writing, your structure and characters and on the best way to tell your story.

The day

In the first half of the day, you'll develop your story or series premise, write a basic and advanced story sentence, and sharpen the main plot and character arcs and the underlying subtext.

You'll learn to define the essence of a story, explore the crucial differences between the inner and outer stories, and how they interrelate to help you enrich the themes of your script and solve typical problems with endings.

In the second half, we'll help you take this short outline and show you how to write to the best of your ability. We'll help you sharpen the plot, improve your choice of words and sentence structure and deepen the meaning. We'll look at how you add detail without losing the overall flow and energy.

We'll define the different kinds of treatments, outlines and synopses that you will need to provide potential collaborators and sources of finance and teach you some simple techniques for growing your synopsis into longer and longer treatments from 1 to 20 pages long, as required.

You'll leave with the foundations of a flowing, exciting, attractive treatment that does full justice to the story or series that you want to create.

Includes

• The role of outlines in script development and marketing
• The requirements of a successful treatment
• Choice of vocabulary, language patterns and structures
• The traps that treatment writers must avoid
• Nine vital steps towards writing an exciting treatment
• Using story sentence, inner story, character constellation
• The step outline
• The masterscene treatment

A detailed information pack including full copies of top professional treatments and synopses is included in the course fee