Preproduction
In class you’re going to be making a horror film. When you’re thinking of an idea, try to come up with a simple concept that involves no more than one location and a couple of actors. Keeping the production small and coming up with a clever script is the best way to create a polished short film. Over the holidays you need to write a treatment, screenplay and storyboard your film.
Writing a treatment
A treatment is one of the earliest documents prepared during the pre-production process. The treatment is simply an outline of your story from beginning to end. You don’t have to include dialogue. This is an extremely powerful way to play around with your story without having ideas set in concrete. As Benjamin Craig notes: “A treatment is a narrative version of the story in a script, presented in story format, describing the main action with little or no dialogue. Many writers use treatments as a way of fleshing out their stories in narrative format to map out the flow of the action across the major scenes in the script before they start work on the dialogue. This way the writer can be sure that the story flows correctly before they commence the actually script.”
Writing a screenplay
A screenplay is the shooting script that is used by actors during rehearsal and on the set. Screenplays are written in a particular format to make them easily readable.
When writing a screenplay, you need to follow some fundamental rules to ensure it’s easy to read:
• traditionally screenplays are written using the font Courier;
• use at least size twelve;
• begin every scene with a slugline;
• write character names, important props and sound effects in capital letters.
If you’re serious about screenwriting, there is also a great piece of software that you can use called Celtx, which incorporates screenwriting and storyboarding features side by side. This software is available for a variety of platforms. Download this PDF from The Oscars website which explains how a screenplay should be formatted.
Sample screenplays
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is the process of previsualizing your film using a pencil and paper. Storyboarding is a very powerful way of visually planning your film before you start shooting. Some filmmakers, like M Night Shyamalan, put a great deal of effort into their storyboards. On The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan had planned every single frame before he started shooting. Ridley Scott is another extremely talented and successful director who quite often draws his own images to convey what a scene should look like. His pictures are so well-known that they are referred to as ‘Ridleygrams’. When he was making the seminal 1979 film Alien, 20th Century Fox was so impressed with the quality and detail of Ridley Scott’s storyboards that they substantially increased the budget for the film.
