5 Pro Tips To Make The Best Music Video Treatment And Get More Work
Do you dream of directing music videos? Then you need to become a master at the overlooked art of creating music video treatments—the essential first step in music video production and entry key to getting the job as the music video director!
A music video treatment is essentially a digital pitch document packed with text and images used by a music video director at the start of the music video production to present their creative vision for the music video to the artists, record labels, and production team—ensuring everybody is on the same page.
A strong music video treatment will give the reader a clear understanding of the story idea the music video director wants to tell, the main characters, the tone, color palette, and style of the final video, and why their idea is worth the financial investment.
While there's no right or wrong way to write and design treatments for music videos, I wanted to share five design tips based on my best practices to ensure your music video treatment looks as good as it reads!
Table of contents:
Discover a wide range of fully customizable treatment templates to help you support your vision and make your digital document look as beautiful and professional as possible!
1. Protect the readability of your Music video treatment
The most important thing about a music video treatment design is to protect its readability by keeping the layout clean and simple, so you can direct the eyes of the reader to focus on the idea, and they aren’t distracted by visual (irrelevant) noise.
This is important because you can write the most amazing music video concept in the world, but if the design clashes with the text and your audience have to put too much effort into reading, they won’t read it.
To help you protect the readability of your video treatment, here are four things you can do:
Choose the right fonts.
The first thing to help you protect the readability of your music video treatment is choosing the right fonts. Two easy-to-read fonts, three maximum, will usually do the job.
Choose one font for the titles, one for the body text, and perhaps one more for quotes or additional text you want to highlight in the document.
I get all my fonts from Google Fonts, which has a diverse library of free fonts you can use for personal and business projects.
Use visual weight.
Another trick to help protect the readability of your treatment and direct the eyes of your audience is to use visual weight. Meaning—people first notice pieces of text that stand out because of different font sizes, colors, thicknesses, and negative space surrounding them.
The more an element on a page of your treatment attracts the eye of the reader, the greater its visual weight. For example, in this blog, it’s the different titles, subtitles, links, and highlighted words that grab people’s attention first.
The best way to create visual weight is by using different (color) contrasts in your layout, imagery, and font stylization.
Choose a simple, coherent style and a clean layout
To help you achieve that visual weight, choose a simple, coherent style and a clean layout that you can use consistently across all your slides.
Avoid using big blocks of text on individual slides that make the task of reading the text look overwhelming. Instead, divide the text into small 3-4 sentenced paragraphs over multiple slides with lots of negative space.
Use a logical order of information.
Use a logical order of information, keep the spacing of all your content aligned, and stay away from using a lot of random distracting colors on each different slide (unless that’s the concept of the video).
Your music video treatment should be short and to the point, so edit out any superfluous words or phrases, ensuring every sentence serves a purpose.
2. Use lots of eye-catching images in your Music Video Treatment
In sales, a beautiful line by legendary sales trainer Zig Zagler quotes: “People buy on emotion and justify with logic.”
One of the primary emotional triggers in music video treatments is the visuals. Images are the visual bridge between ideas & imagination.
Add to those clean collages of visual references your director's vision and ideas in vividly written language; combined, they will trigger the imaginative emotion of the potential final product.
At the end of the day, films are a visual medium. No one wants to read a 20-page script document, no matter how good the whole story is, but everybody wants to feel what the potential outcome could be by looking at eye-catching imagery in a visually appealing treatment.
Pick the Images for your music video treatments carefully.
But not just random images pulled from the web. Instead, you want to use high-quality imagery that supports and elevates the words on the page to new heights.
You can include photos, concept art, paintings, storyboards, or anything else to help the reader visualize what you have in mind for the project.
This article summarizes my favorite visual online resources for finding the perfect images for video treatments and film pitch decks.
3. Incorporate quotes in the design of your Music Video Treatment
In my music video and director treatments, I like to work with quotes & one-liners because they can help to condense complicated concepts into easy-to-understand language.
It's usually one simple sentence that can summarize everything I'm trying to convey in long paragraphs of text.
Other than that, quotes help me set the tone, convey the project's personality, enhance the design, break up a predictable slide formula and give the scenes and chapters some breathing room.
If you want to incorporate some quotes in your design, ensure they genuinely relate to the idea you're trying to convey in your document.
When pitching for music videos, I usually incorporate a specific sentence from the song that stood out to me or where the concept and story are centered around.
4. Use Grammar software to prevent typos and grammatical errors
If there is one thing that will destroy the design of your treatment and make it look sloppy, it’s typos & grammatical errors. I believe that if you have a lot of grammar mistakes in your pitch, it will take away some of your credibility.
It shows that you don't take the details seriously, and that's when you start with a two-point deduction in your prospect's mind.
Start writing treatments with Grammarly.
To check my grammar, I use a software called Grammarly. This is an online writing tool you can install on your Google Chrome browser or use as an app on your computer.
In a matter of seconds, Grammarly finds spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and tells you how to fix them.
I have been using Grammarly for a few years, which has helped tremendously! The current software version only works with English, but I guess it's just a matter of time before they add additional languages.
5. Customize Every Music Video Treatment For Your Audience
Unfortunately, music video treatments are not one-size-fits-all documents. There are no hard and fast rules or specific bullet points a finished product should include so you can win every music video pitch.
There are only guidelines and best practices; therefore, every music video treatment needs to be customized for each recipient.
Ask for lots of client input before you begin.
Before you start the creative process of writing and designing your treatment, take some time to research the specific audience you're pitching to see if there's anything specific they're looking for.
Then, tailor your music video treatment to their needs to increase your chances of getting a yes!
Use a Music video treatment template.
If you need extra help creating your music video treatment and conveying your visual ideas, you can use one of these pre-designed music video treatment templates.
Instead of designing your pitch deck from scratch and wasting valuable creative thinking time, drag and drop your images in the template, insert your text files, export them to a PDF file, and your pitch is ready for take-off!
Final Thoughts on making music video treatments
Creating a great music video treatment before pre-production is essential for any director hoping to get their music videos off the ground or land the gig as the music video director.
By following these simple design tips, you can be sure that your music video treatment will stand out from the rest and give you the best chance of getting funding for your ideas!
If you’re looking for more tips on how to write a music video treatment, this blog article might contain a nugget of knowledge gold for you!
