Tools to help you write your treatment

For our music video contest, there are three major ways to communicate your vision for the video: your storyboard, your pitch video, and your treatment.

In this post, we’ll tackle the treatment for your idea. There are some excellent resources on the web to point you in the right direction as you craft a top-notch treatment. Read on for some of our favorites.

Everything starts with an idea. Whether or not this is the easy part for you, there’s much to learn from Nigel Dick’s article, Writing the Music Video Treatment. Nigel Dick, an award-winning writer and director, has over 240 music videos under his belt, as well as 18 documentaries and feature films. Here he outlines how he finds inspiration for all those treatments and how he breaks his treatments down during the writing process. Super helpful. (Also, a big thanks to Norman Hollyn for hosting this.)

http://www.norman-hollyn.com/535/handouts/musicvid_dick.pdf

Noisiblog boasts a great article that outlines what you need to know before sitting down to write your treatment. It’s written from the perspective of a professional writer, who notes that it might be easier for those with production experience to craft feasible treatments. The author breaks his points down nicely, and it’s a good idea to take all of them into consideration when you’re writing your treatment for Low vs Diamond’s video.

http://braddon.blogspot.com/2007/05/business-and-sometimes-art-of-music.html

It never hurts to see some examples. Here are a few short examples of what a treatment might look like. As the article notes, there are a couple of rules to follow: write in a present tense, be descriptive and sell your idea. Don’t try to mimic these exactly. They are on the short and simplistic side, but may be useful as inspiration.

http://ballewvideoproduction1.blogspot.com/2007/11/great-treatment-example.html

And finally, some more thoughts. Some of the tips in the following post are irrelevant for this contest (you don’t get to meet Low vs Diamond, sorry) but a lot of it is userful, like the advice to ‘think in terms of the structure of the song.’

http://pan0rama.blogspot.com/2007/12/tips-on-writing-your-first-music-video.html

You should be all ready to write your treatment now. Click here for more information on the Low vs Diamond music video contest.