Treatment & Screenwriting

We are classically-trained, yet progressive storytellers, with more than eight years of experience writing for the screen.

Screenplays

Screenplays or scripts detail, in the present tense, what the audience can see and hear: the setting of a scene, actions, expressions, dialogues of the characters. The format is structured in a way that one page usually equates to one minute of screen time.

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Treatments

A film treatment is a piece of prose, typically the step between the theme/synopsis and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture or television program. It is generally longer and more descriptive than a synopsis, detailing the most relevant actions. Treatments read like short stories. They are told in the present tense and describe events as they happen. They establish a foundation for the script.

The following is the first paragraph of the treatment written by Kindrid Parker for Act III, Scene 1, a cinematographic adaptation of Shakespeare's play:

Prince Hamlet is in a state of mourning. His father, King of Denmark, has been stealthily assassinated by Hamlet‘s uncle, conspiring with the Queen, Prince Hamlet‘s own mother. Now the uncle occupies the crown and the Queen. The dead King’s son, Prince Hamlet (along with the rest of Denmark) suspects foul play. In the midst of this turmoil, Hamlet and his girlfriend, Lady Ophelia, are weathering the storm in a townhouse together. Ophelia grows desperate and unbalanced as she feels her lover slipping away into his own melancholy - dividing himself from, not only his kingdom, and perhaps his wits, but also the core of their love. Tormented by Hamlet’s distance, Ophelia pops pills to cope, and waits it out, acting out an absurd domestic role to bide her time, but little does she know that Hamlet is being “visited” by an apparition, the ghost of his father, the former king, who has put him on a path of bloody vengeance that may part Hamlet of his very humanity. Oh yeah, and it’s in black and white.

"Every art possesses its own peculiar method of effectively presenting its matter. This remains true, of course, for film. To work at a scenario, without knowing the methods of directorial work, the methods of shooting and cutting a film, is as foolish as giving a Frenchman a Russian poem in literal translation... In order to write a scenario suitable for filming, one must know the methods by which the spectator can be influenced from the screen." Vsevolod Illarionovich Podovkin, 1929.

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