The start of a TV treatment.

Last week in Seattle, and the week before in DC, I touched on the concept of writing a treatment for commercials as well as television projects. Writing a treatment for a commercial is explained here in an article I wrote for Digital Photo Pro magazine. Writing a treatment for a television show is a little different.

When I was speaking in Seattle I promised to post a treatment I wrote for a television show that was pitched to the SyFy channel. The concept for the show was hatched by my friend, Craig Titley, a screen writer who wrote the soon to be released Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightening Thief. The basic premise of the show is based on an Outer Limits style platform with a twist. I’m not going to reveal the twist just in case this thing gets shopped around again, but if you’re astute, you can probably figure it out.

Craig told me about the concept of the show about two years ago when we were out at dinner in Los Angeles. As as he explained the premise I was inspired by an idea that I thought would work for the show and asked if I could write a treatment for the pilot. I wrote the first draft, which is about three times as long as the third draft, on a plane flight to New York. I walked away from it for about a month before coming back to it with fresh eyes to edit and refine the story.

I took a shorter break after the second draft because the story was spinning around the back of my brain all the time and I resolved some of the issues I was having within few weeks. Believe me, it doesn’t always work that way. The next step was to register it with the Writers Guild of America registry to add some level of protection to the intellectual property. After that I turned it in to get pitched. I’ll post the treatment on PhotoCine News on Monday as a downloadable PDF.