Planning Our Treatment

The first step to today's task was understanding what a treatment was. In the music industry it is when a label sends out a brief (occasionally including the artist's ideas) to roughly a dozen of directors asking them to deliver a treatment. The treatment being their idea for the video, a pitch of their vision presenting only using a document - it must stand alone as it is not presenting in person. 

It is important that the label can see various ideas and visions for the music video to see which would work best for the song, artist and their image. This is because music videos are often advertisements for performers, while they do make somme money from views, it is more about those viewers then going to stream the song as that is what makes the most revenue. Big labels do not have time to read through lengthy descriptions of what they will be looking at on screen, additionally, it is their visual ideas so it is best to relay it visually and as literal and straight forward as possible. 

We looked at example treatments from songs such as 'Housework' by Jax Jones from the label 'Polydor'. It was good to see a visual example so that we knew and understood the best way to lay ours out and with the most clarity. It also helped me to understand what to include, instead of editing and camera angles it is more about what the audience is actually seeing on their screen. Eg. costume, choreography, emotion, set etc. 

When planning our treatment, it was important that we organised 3 different elements (minimum) to cut between and maintain audience interest. One of these must include a performance or lip-sync aspect as, ultimately, we are selling the personality of the artist. It is also clear through this planning and our genre research that Indie Pop is all about the aesthetic and colour palette. While this means we must be very organised and ensure everything is cohesive, the Wes Anderson style that it takes after is what we are after and fits the song perfectly. Now we have split the different elements of the treatment between us and can start to look for our photos and visual evidence.