How to Write a Film Treatment for Investors

The script has been completed and the producer has arranged meetings with investors about potentially financing the film. He asks you for a treatment of the script to offer the investors. Unlike the treatment you wrote before writing the script, this treatment needs to become a professional document. This tutorial will teach you how to "woo" investors with a treatment.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• film script
• computer
• pre-script treatment

1. Complete the script. Writing a treatment for investors requires the script to be complete, or at least complete at that point.
2. Update the pre-script treatment. If this is about to go to investors, odds are a few drafts of the script have been done, and it has evolved from when you began.
3. List the characters and whether they are major/supporting/principal on the first page(s).
4. Describe Act One. This should reach much like a book. The goal here is to turn a 100 page script into a 5-6 page document that gets the exact same plot points and action across.
5. Repeat Step #4 for the remaining two or four acts. If you have a script over five acts, you do not have a film script, you have a mini-series or television show.
6. Be dramatic and capitalize/underline words. An investor will not read a script, but can be very impressed with the movie before ever hearing dialog if you purvey the drama through prose.
7. Stay within the story. Avoid sounding like the writer and sound more like an impartial narrator. "I" and "My" are off-limits here.

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