1 Design: Story Packaging Tools
Story Packaging Tools
There are some conventional ways that film makers convey their ideas for their films with the written word. These might be used for different reasons. To plan, to pitch, promote or produce a film.
- Synopsis & Logline
- Outlines & Proposal
- Treatment
- Pitch Decks
- Story – what your film is about in broad terms, including some of the main conflicts, themes, turning points
- Plot – the detail of what happens; who, what, where, how and why. And in what order
Okay, onto opening up the toolbox…
Sentence Synopsis or Logline
A one-sentence synopsis, also known as a logline, is the most concentrated version possible of your story and your plot. You reveal your overarching theme and how your characters experience it. What happens? And to whom?
Writing a one-sentence synopsis can be tricky and often require quite a bit of effort. But it can also be very helpful in forcing you to really focus your ideas. To hone in – very directly – into what you want to say with your film and how.
A good one-sentence synopsis can also be useful to form the basis of your “elevator pitch” to others you’re seeking to interest in your film.
Some examples:
- THE MATRIX: A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers. (IMDb)
- JAWS: A police chief, with a phobia for open water, battles a gigantic shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open.
- THE COVE: Using state-of-the-art equipment, a group of activists, led by renowned dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry, infiltrate a cove near Taijii, Japan to expose both a shocking instance of animal abuse and a serious threat to human health.
- MOLLY AND MOBARAK: A young Afghan refugee finds love in a small country town divided by race.
In the online Storytelling Workshop delivered on the 13th of April 2023, Stephen Oliver (former Head of Documentaries at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) encouraged those who attended to develop a title and one-line elevator pitch which they then shared and received feedback from Stephen. Stephen has graciously offered to provide feedback to those unable to attend. Please share your elevator pitch in the Padlet below for your peers to view. Look at other students’ pitches and provide feedback. Once there is a collection of elevator pitches, your responses will be forwarded on to Stephen on your behalf for feedback. Please comment in the Padlet if you don’t want this to happen.
Paragraph or Page Synopsis
A paragraph synopsis allows a bit more room to expand on the filmakers’ intended interpretation of the subject and its wider significance. The one-page synopsis is often a standard accepted length for a feature-length film’s synopsis.
Some examples:
(from Screen Australia: What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment)
- MOLLY AND MOBARAK:
Twenty-two year old Mobarak works in the Young abattoir with 90 other Afghani refugees. Befriended by a local family, Mobarak falls in love with the daughter, Molly, a teacher. But with his Temporary Protection Visa running out and the future uncertain, Mobarak is fearful of being returned to his village in Afghanistan. Molly and Mobarak’s burgeoning relationship is set against the racial tensions, resurgent after the Bali bombing, of a small community.
- “Here is a ‘pitch’ one paragraph version of Travelling North:
This is a comedy-drama about Frances, a middle-aged widow, trapped in a wintry Melbourne granny flat and subject to the demands of her unhappy daughters. She escapes with her aging but passionate lover, Frank, and travels north to the idyllic Queensland coast. But Frank turns out to be an incommunicative curmudgeon, who has hidden a heart condition from her. Plagued with guilt about her daughters, Frances must nevertheless become Frank’s nurse with the support – of the local doctor and a widower neighbour. Frances breaks through the now vulnerable Frank’s shell; they find happiness at last and marry. Frank dies, and although doctor and neighbour offer themselves, Frances has found herself and is finally free: she will go on ‘travelling north’.
The slightly longer pitch version has several advantages. First, it can actually be used as a pitch. Second, as a pitch it is mercifully short and avoids the MEGO (Mine Eyes Glaze Over) factor. Third, success or failure can be gauged at once by whether or not listeners to the pitch are hooked and ask questions. It also forces the storyteller to define just what their story is.”
Outline or Proposal
This is a document where you expand your synopsis to show how you will tell your film story on the screen. For factual or documentary films, the outline is more often an explicit proposal of how the film will explore an issue and deliver an argument. And with what style or method.
- What resources will be used to tell the story, creating new ones or reusing old ones
- How will they be used on screen
- How will the film show the audience fresh insights into topics they may be aquainted with
The outline should convince us that there is a story to be told, a specific story that has wider implications, and a narrative to weave around it. It should also show access to the characters and to the necessary components to make the film
(from Screen Australia: What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment)
“Ideally, the documentary film will reverberate beyond its specifics. For example, Molly and Mobarak tells a ‘love story’, but has far wider implications in illustrating and questioning government policies on asylum seekers. The narrative of After Mabo questions the whole history of race relations in Australia. The story of one professor of music in Facing the Music raises issues about the purpose and funding of any university department today.
The proposal, then, should state why this subject matters to the filmmaker and why the filmmaker believes it will matter to an audience.
The trap with a documentary proposal is that it can look like a lecture justified by worthy intentions – and the fact that it’s factual or ‘true’. In other words, what the audience should know, rather than what it wants to know. The way to avoid this trap is to discover the potential of the story as a narrative: Who is the protagonist/hero/heroine? Who or what are they up against? What is the conflict and what is at stake? WHO, WHAT and HOW.”
Treatment
Your treatment is really a description of how your film will look, sound and feel on screen to your audience. How will you use all of your material and how will it come across on the screen? How will we experience it? The treatment is almost a written text-based immersion into your film idea.
You might include reference to and build in to your treatment: your key interviews, vocal grabs, photographs, data visualisations, maps, existing footage, audio or other resources.
Here is a portion of the treatment for the film Eternity:
(from Screen Australia: What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment)
“Ruth Ridley is the strong and feisty daughter of the preacher John Ridley. She sits in the studio before a beautiful, stylised landscape of a sea at sunset. She explains the influence her father had on Arthur Stace, who was later to become known as ‘Mr Eternity’. A photograph of John Ridley appears. It was Ridley’s sermon, ’Echoes of Eternity’, which supposedly converted Stace to Christianity in the 1930s. It was after this sermon that Stace took a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote, in beautiful copperplate script on the sidewalks of Sydney, the one word that would influence many for the next four decades: ‘Eternity’.
The image of Arthur Stace appears, recreated, as he walks away from the Sydney Harbour Bridge, wearing a dark coat and Depression-era hat. 1920s archival footage of two male swimmers, seen from overhead, lying on a cliff face. The turbulent sea hits the cliff as the sea runs over their bodies. John Ridley’s poetic sermon booms loudly as the sea returns to hit the cliff face and the swimmers hold on tightly.”
(from Screen Australia: What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment)
“A scene or a sequence in a drama film, given adequate resources and competence, will be realised more or less as written. The making of a documentary, however, may involve the elements of discovery and even surprise.
The documentary treatment, therefore, like other synopses, is a statement of intent. It is a description of the film you want to make and think you can, given what you know and what you have access to when the filming begins. With a drama, it is said that the final draft is written in the edit suite; with a documentary this is literally true.”
For more information: What is a synopsis.pdf