The Not So Silent Treatment
Posted by Simon J. Green | Filed under Comics, Uncategorized
Treatments are freakin’ grouse! A film treatment is a prose version of the story, step by step and without dialogue. I’ve been doing this for our graphic novel. If you know this already, good for you my friend! Share the knowledge with people who don’t, because that’s what I’m trying to do. I love treatments because it’s so much easier to shift a paragraph then have to rewrite three pages of script. It lets you see the structure in a broad sense. It also lets your editor make the bulk of changes before you painstakingly lay down that excellent dialogue and then lose great swathes of it when the structure turns out no good.
You know what else we should’ve done, though? Character profiles. We’ve created a pair of new villains and are fleshing out an old Rufus ally for this book. I had an idea on the characters, brought out through my treatment. Darren had a few different ideas. We had to then stop the treatment redrafting process and hammer down our characters so we could better understand their actions in the story.
Next time, I’ll try and remember this and do it first, but then sometimes you can’t know what a character will do until you confront them with a situation. That’s the beauty of this awesome process of writing and story.
Killeroo is the creation of Darren Close, all around comic geek, freelance designer and poker tragic. His parents are so proud.