I’m looking for some collaboration insight from the community. When you bring a writer onto a project, what’s the ideal length for a treatment or scriptment to hand over—how many pages feel like too much, and how many feel too little? For those with experience in both film and TV, what length gives writers enough to work from without overwhelming them? I’m creating a catalog for future collaborations and want to make sure I’m providing the right amount of material.
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Hey, Dwayne Williams 2. I've never brought a writer onto a project, but I have teamed up with writers to turn their ideas into scripts. We made treatments that were a few pages and treatments that were really long (30 pages and more). It depended on the story and how much worldbuilding we had to do.
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If you can't communicate it in five pages maximum, it's probably got a problem. I'm both including or excluding images in that - those are a great help.
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It certainly can vary. I am about to enter my 2nd collaboration as the writer on someone else's project. I have a specific way of putting together my scripts that is probably ass backwards and can take some adjusting to so I think open dialogue about expectations and timing is the most important item to address, and the creative side sort of just works itself out. For me so far at least.
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If I send someting to someone else, I send something very short. One or a few sentences, and make it very clear that I have thought about far more details. Because if I send everything at the same time, the risk is that it will be overwhelming.
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I don't think there's a clear answer. However, the more you detail, the more you're going to constrain the writer's own creativity and vision. That might be a shared goal, to simply have them turn your story into a script. If you want them to be more conceptual, though, the environment needs to be less defined.