Screenplay, Treatment, Outline, Synopsis
In a perfect world the only document that would determine the articulation of a project into production would be the screenplay itself. Alas the world aint perfect and so the process of moving a cinematic project from concept to production involves a range of distilled writing manifestations. Treatment, Synopsis, Outline, Tag Line, Step Outline, Concept statement - this list seems endless.
It's arguable that these ancillary documents have little purpose other than to serve as means for producers to comprehend the story and make decisions on it without actually reading the script.
That's the cynics perspective anyway. The more positive way to look at the various documents that accompany the screenplay is to consider them as building block components of not the writing process culminating in the screenplay, but rather the production process culminating in the movie.
Treatment, synopsis, outline are just tools not religious objects and writers should be free to use them as tools not end products. It's often suggested that a screenplay should start as a treatment first but if the treatment is really a 'pitch' document, a way to succinctly present the screenplay ideas in a short form, then this makes little sense. Rather, writing a tightly presented treatment after the screenplay appears more logical - a distillation of the screenplay not a precursor to it.
Likewise and conversely the Step Outline of one sentence descriptors of each scene in the screenplay is often lauded as a production document, a distillation of the screenplay to its bare bones. And yet there is a strong logic that points to the Step Outline as a structural organization tool to precede the writing of the screenplay.
This document from the Australian Film Commission provides a detailed and pragmatic overview of the various treatment, synopsis and outline documents. But at the same time it shouldn't be forgotten that its the script that counts and everything else is simply a set of assisting tools. Some can be exploited to facilitate production, others for purposes of pitching and attention getting. Still others for the development of the screenplay itself. There are no hard rules, just a set of tools to be exploited as needed.
Posted at 12:00AM Feb 28, 2008
by Mike Jones in general |
