Notes for a Movie Treatment

I recently had the opportunity to work with a church that had a big culminating event coming up. I was brought in as a consultant to create an opening video. The idea of the video would summarize their theme and express their main message. I was excited to take part in this project as I saw it as a way to apply what I had learned over the last two years. I did these four things to deliver the client’s idea and bring it to life.

The first is meeting the client. I did my best to listen in and ask them questions about the theme and intent of their video. Beforehand I already wrote questions in my notebook in case I forgot something. Questions like, what feeling do you want the audience to have while watching it? And what is the key takeaway from the video? I knew this part was crucial as the concept would feed off what was discussed during this meeting.

The second is creating a Treatment. Here I applied what I learned from Jordan Orme, a video editor who has worked with multiple big-name artists in the industry in LA. A Treatment is a visual aid that helps the client visualize the video. It’s composed of Still images to give you an idea of the look of the video. It also contains details of the summary of the video along with its concept, main message, and color grading. When I got home from the meeting I went right to my laptop and started creating the Treatment as everything was still fresh in my mind. After I made it, I sent it to the creative team and they loved it! We scheduled another meeting date and that is where I presented my concept.

So the third thing was preparing to present. While presenting my concept to the team the Treatment made it easier to describe the video. I could go down to the details and take it scene by scene. I did my best to run them through the details of each scene to give their videographers an idea of how the shots would look. They were very impressed with it and got excited about the idea of starting! So the date for the shoot was set.

Lastly, executing the plan. The date to shoot was set but unfortunately, I was busy during their shooting day given the tasks as their editor. I had high hopes for their videography team. When I received the footage I was happy that they were able to take most of the shots I had envisioned. Although some could have been better it was good enough. I knew the opportunity and experience would teach me new things, and I believed that all the hard work would be worth it.