Peter Neal

"Originality is very overrated". Is that thought utter blasphemy for a writer...? I don't think so, depending of course on what your goal in writing really is.
Cliches...horror fans throughout the www know them by heart and love to complain about them in various reviews and debates- yet they seem to be magically attracted to any new slasher-, backwoods-, torture porn flick coming along, though years of watching movies should have told them by now that they'll be once again in...

Watching and reviewing 1982's "Poltergeist" some months ago got me really thinking again about how much the present fixation on "target groups" has drastically changed the kind of (movie) entertainment we're served in the present day.
Whereas the 70's/80's blockbusters (particularly the Spielberg- and Lucas supervised and influenced ones) went to high lengths to furnish stories, which would appeal to and satisfy the entertainment needs of a whole "average family",...

You're prepared, you know where you want your story and characters to go: Time to write!
But before you start writing you should remember that there'll ALWAYS be a 2nd draft, a 3rd, probably many, many more.
Which means- to me at least- that the first draft is still very much a testing ground.
Thanks to the treatment, you don't have to think about the whole of your script for each and every line, you can concentrate on your script scene by scene, as the path you've intended...

A treatment in the "professional" sense- the kind you send on its journey to production companies and cultural/media funds- is telling your movie's story from start to finish, scene by scene, on 10+ pages (depending on the length you're aiming at).
You should avoid reflecting too much about what's happening INSIDE your characters, most important is what's actually supposed to happen on screen.
If you have a clever "surprise ending/revelation", do yourself a favour...

Okay, some might consider my following notion as "limiting" to their creativity, but in fact it usually gets my inner "writing machine" really going, as it fills me with a feeling of: "Yeah, this really could be pulled off!"

So, you want to write a script for a short movie or a full feature, but you're not exactly blessed with a bank account bursting with cash, then you have to take the following advice by heart before you're even writing your script...