Your treatment is going to be a storyboard of a key extract from your planned film and a detailed justification of the choices you have made in that storyboard.

To work towards this I’m going to give you a completed storyboard and I want you to write a justification of it. This is from an exam board model answer that was marked at Distinction.  The one significant thing the exam board said was wrong with it was that the storyboard doesn’t include timings.

The brief was to make a short advert promoting a campaign to encourage young people to spend less time on their phones, and the information provided included statistics about the damage screentime could to do academic achievement. The full brief is here…

We don’t have the formal Activity 3 – Proposal that goes with this storyboard, but the ‘ideas generation’ from their Activity 1 – Rationale says

My idea is based in a classroom with a class of 30 students on their phones, playing games, messaging and ignoring the teacher.  The teacher comes around the classroom to hand out sheets of paper for everyone that have insulting messages written in large sizes on them such as ‘Homeless’ and ‘No Job’. The students are so concentrated on their screens that they don’t see these messages.  ~The students then start to look up from their phones one by one in shock, disgusted by what they’re seeing.  The advert then ends with the teacher stood by the interactive  board as the narrator says ‘If you could see the problem, you’d stop’ followed by several statistics that appear on the board as found in my questionnaire findings, replaced by the Switch Off logo appearing on the board, with the website link available for the audience to look more into the company, the social media pages for Switch Off and a hashtag for the audience to post about and generate interest. 

… and the storyboard is here…

If I was writing a justification for this, I might begin…

Frame 1

• The brief is aimed at teenagers so my setting of a school will speak to them in a clear and obvious way

• My film opens with a wide shot of the classroom to establish the setting immediately. In a 30 second commercial there isn’t time to add an external establishing shot of the school itself.

• Although it doesn’t show on the drawn storyboard a key mise en scene aspect of the shot will be all of the rectangles of light coming from the phone screens that students are holding around the room.  This will be instantly recognisable to my target audience and establishes the key theme of the film – screentime.

• Just the diagetic sound of the teacher talking – part of creating a real world atmosphere for the audience

• This location is practical and straightforward for me to shoot in, doesn’t involve travel or complicated bookings.  The one practical production issue to be addressed is checking ages in case there is a need for parents/guardians to sign consent forms and contributor release forms.

There is more detailed guidance about creating a storyboard here…