Part I: Creation ex nihilo
Part II: Scheduling & Research
Part III: Writing a treatment is like writing a short story. It must be complete, interesting, detailed-but-not-too-much, engaging, and must establish the "flow" of the entire screenplay.
The inciting idea for starting a screenplay is either a) a cool premise or setting, b) an interesting character, c) an important and stimulating theme, or d) an interesting plot. If your starting point is d, then you have to create (or discover) characters, themes, and settings to fit your plot. You have the spine; you need to adorn it with organs, muscles, and skin. If you starting point is a b or c, then you have your work cut out for you. You have the idea for an interesting eye, or a compelling person, and you need to invent (or discover) all of the actions that person will take.
We started with a cool premise. We came up with a related theme we liked. Now the plot.
The treatment demands that you translate all ethereal interesting abstractions into a scene-by-scene narrative. Sure the character is going to go through a worldview crisis, but where does he work, at what time in his life are we introduced to him, what seemingly insignificant events eventually culminate in this crisis?
Dizzy and I had our work cut out for us. David Allen once said that "leadership is the ability to turn 'vague ambiguous stuff' into action items." We had a character, a theme, an idea... And we wanted a script. With manful self-will, we simply began.
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