You gotta read the label

Yes cuz. This week In Your Face turns its attention to the thorny issue of directors' treatments. Now I don't intend this to be an exhaustive study of the art of video treatment writing. I'm sure there's a combined GNVQ in video scripting and applied painting and decorating in the media studies department at Richmond college that already covers it. No. This is purely an arbitrary, subjective and extemporaneous diatribe about video treatments - and what I hate about them.

"And the lifetime achievement award for most played out photographic reference in a treatment goes to... Gregory Crewdson."


Enough fucking Crewdson already. The apogee of Crewdson mania undoubtedly came in 2008 when I received at least 15 treatments that referenced his work. Each of his photographs costs in the region of a million dollars to produce. So how the fuck are you gonna re-create his heavily stylized, art-directed look on a £15k video for a shit indie band? How? Talk to me. Crewdson's consumables budget is probably more than £15k. I bet Crewdson spends £15k on making it rain in Hooters at his wrap parties. And anyway if I did have to commission a million dollar video, I can guarantee you that the artist wouldn't want to spend it all on one portentous Crewdson-esque set-up. They'd wanna spend it on lots of shit like this.

Same goes for David Lachapelle.


It doesn't matter what lighting package you've blagged off AFM, you will never emulate a Lachapelle picture by filming on location in East Ham with a bunch of munters from Durham. Apologetic whine: "Yeah but we're shooting on the Red camera. This is the perfect format with which to explore the hyper-real - the plasticity of contemporary culture if you will." What? What? Do you wanna say that again to my face? No? Then get the fuck outta here before I cold cock you.

Yep. If I see Crewdson or Lachapelle staring out at me when I open that PDF, it's getting shit-canned immediately, which is fine because it means less reading for Timmy.

And don't get me started on animal masks.


There were other films made in the 1970s aside from 'The Wicker Man'. Can't you copy them instead?

What else. Oh yeah. That MGMT video was really good. But if I get any more ideas featuring 'so bad it's good' hipster, blue screen post, I'm gonna come round your house and paint it chroma key azure and see how you fucking like it.

I understand that in this unscrupulous era of 20-treatments-per-track commissioning gang rape, directors might have to recycle some of their ideas from time to time. I get it. I also know how hard directors work to perfect their concepts. The sheer volume of treatments that they have to write makes it unfeasible for them to come up with something original every time. It's cool. Just make sure that you're careful with the 'find and replace' function on your puter. There's nothing Paolo Nutini hates more than mysteriously turning into James Morrison half way through a treatment. It's bad for his self-esteem.

And while I'm on the subject, the standards of treatment proof reading have plummeted in the past few years. Fucked spelling. Inconsistent capitalization. Insane verb conjugation. Punctuation that wouldn't look out of place in a demented Chris Farley Blackberry message, sent one handed from the wheel of his Ford Excursion, while battered on speedballs at dawn.


I know most video directors went to St Martins and therefore probably spent their formative years looking at books containing pictures rather than words, and bunking off the extra after school remedial writing classes. SShhhhh. It's not your fault sweetie. Mummy doesn't think you're stupid. You're just different. But there's no excuse for confusing 'there' and 'their', particularly when your humanities degree wielding rep should be checking this shit for you.

I also appreciate that much of the music sent to directors by labels isn't especially inspiring, and that as a result sometimes there's no option but to fall back on an 'elements' idea. For example: the band's performance is so intense that their guitars catch fire, before a curious wind blows them over; the singer songwriter's delivery is so emotive that it starts raining and he jumps off a cliff; the female solo artist's dancing is so fierce that the ground starts to shake and a big dance earthquake spreads out across the world. You know what I'm talking about. Earth, water, air and fire - the video maker's redeemers. Everyone's had to either write or commission an 'elements' idea at some point. Some of the greatest videos ever made are 'elemental'. That's not the problem. The problem is that people don't call me up before hand to discuss what the 'element' should be. I can't have Alesha standing in a deluge of fucking rain. After about 2 minutes her weave's gonna be somewhere down the back of her neck and her eyes are gonna be filled with nasty wig glue. We don't want our artist to look like she's starring in your favourite bukkake video.


Without wanting to sound like been-around-the-block guy, I've worked in music videos for over 12 years: firstly as a runner, proof-reading treatments, then as a directors' rep, helping to write and develop them, and finally as a video commissioner, deciding which ones to make. Over my career I estimate that I've probably read on average 12 treatments a week. That's 600 hundred every working year. And like I said, I've been doing this shit for 12 years. That makes 7,200 treatments. Most treatments are about 750 words long. That leaves a grand total of 5,400,000 treatment words imbibed during my working life. Let me put that into some kind of perspective: I could have read 'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust, 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina' by Leo Tolstoy, 'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas, 'Les Miserables' by Victor Hugo, 'Clarissa' by Samuel Richardson and 'A Man Without Qualities' by Robert Musil instead and still have had plenty of word change from my five and a half milly.

I feel bad enough about this as it is, so please don't make me read more than a page of writing. And I'm the least of your worries. The poor cunts in marketing are stuck in back to back meeting oblivion all day. When have they got time to read more than a page? Artists spend most of their time sleeping, flying, driving, doing promo, playing shows, drinking booze, putting drugs in their faces and banging groupies. Have they got time? No one's got any time. In fact directors should take a leaf out of Nez's book and just film themselves describing the idea and intercut it with references. Vaughn Arnell was of course the originator of this steez. It works. I would estimate that a director is 90% more likely to win the job if they present their idea in this manner. Click and play. Even the busiest mother fuckers out there have got time to watch shit on the tinternet. Just remember to get a stylist, because first impressions count. And if you're ugly, you'd better be funny.

It's all love.