A new day, a new task.

Instead of focusing on both audio and visual storytelling, we began the lesson by focusing on visual storytelling. We had to create a story through a series of photos, using between 5-9 images. My group and I ventured out of the university and centred our story on a crime scene due to differences in musical taste, and fortunately enough, there was a news van parked nearby. We also decided to experiment with our visual storytelling. We were only told to create a story using only photos, but what we weren’t told was if we were able to edit these photos or not.

With that in mind, we decided to utilise the features of Snapchat where you can draw on the image using the pen feature. This obviously created a certain aesthetic in our photos as they all had some object drawn into the frame. I think this stylistic feature also helped us tell the story better considering the lack of props we had and the spontaneity of the exercise.

We then went on to write a treatment, either for own story or another group’s. Writing treatments is something that I am not that familiar with.

Below is an excerpt that I wrote of the first two frames:

A young, bright blue-haired girl crouches over the rack of CDs. Focusing 
on a particular section, she remains perusing over the CD collection. 

An album catches her attention and she picks it up. She studies the cover 
before turning it over and reading the setlist. She appears satisfied 
with her choice. 

Like I said, I am not familiar with writing treatments so I wrote this based on the instructions we were given, which was to tell the story in present tense prose. When writing this, I kept in mind what I’ve learned so far with writing scripts, and that includes writing in present tense. So I avoided using adverbs, ’is’ and ‘are’. To me, what I’ve written seems straight to the point, as you would with screenplays. However, this is supposed to be a treatment, so I am definitely curious as to what the differences might be between writing treatments and screenplays, and if there are any other similarities with screenplay structures.