Trust me, I’ll ghost you
Hi there, I’m a ghost.
Boo.
If you need to, take a moment to settle your nerves.
All good? Then let’s proceed.
Despite our rep, ghosts like me really aren’t that scary. Quite the opposite. Sure, I dwell in the shadows, never revealing myself, putting words in the mouths of others…
Ghostwriting. Just in case you haven’t clued in, that’s the incorporeal role I’m talking about. One of the many things I do in this shifting tapestry that is my freelance writing career is clattering my keyboard on behalf of other people.
Really not that terrifying.
The many voices in my head
One thing I learned from 16-odd years in the jokesmithing trenches for some of Australia’s favourite TV presenters (such as Wil Anderson, Paul McDermott and the many hosts of The Project) is how to succinctly and entertainingly capture an authentic turn of phrase, as if the person presenting it had thought up the line themselves on the spot.
Over the past five years, I’ve been using a similar approach to writing in a different format: Director’s Treatments. These documents are typically a detailed deck of slides by a director who has been invited to pitch for a job, most commonly for TV commercials (TVCs).
I’ve written more than 100 of these now, with consistently strong results. Treatments I’ve written have resulted in my clients winning the bid to produce ads for Toyota, eBay, MYOB, Ford, Australia Post, Officeworks, ANZ Bank, BWS, BYD, CC’s, Solo, Coopers, Four’n’Twenty, the Victorian Government, Cuddly and Supercheap Auto, to name a few.
So you’re writing ads?
No, subheading, this isn’t about writing the ads themselves. Sometimes I might suggest ways to finesse the scripts or add alternative lines or ideas, but typically the spots have already been written by creatives at the advertising agency before I’m approached.
I’m engaged by a production company who are pitching their director to be chosen to direct the ads. Typically the agency has come up with a short list of three potential directors to present to their client (whose product or service is the one being advertised). The production companies representing those directors battle it out to land the job for their director and their team.
Who wins comes down to how much the client connects with the director’s showreel of previous work, and their treatment.
Treat or trick?
A treatment describes exactly how the director will approach the campaign. How they see the tone of the visuals and performances, what sort of actors they’re looking for, which particular cinematic techniques they’ll use to pull off aspects of the scripts. How the story comes to life.
They are visually rich documents, which the director and their assistant, the DA, build out of a variety of stills (and increasingly, short video reels) from films, TV and other ads, illustrating how the ads might look. It’s part pitch deck, part coffee table book, that should give you a strong sense of the director’s vision for the campaign.
The reader is guided visually through a structure which answers every question the agency and client would have about how the director intends to create the deliverables: usually ads but possibly also stills.
The specifics vary. Once laid out with graphic flair, some treatments are a dozen pages long, some are fifty. It all depends on the scope and specifics of the campaign.
An average treatment might include sections such as:
- An introduction, perhaps called Hi! (often the personal stories sit here)
- Approach
- Characters & Cast
- Story (where we have the scripts fleshed out into the full cinematic experiences)
- Locations
- Cinematography
- Music
- Edit
- Thanks (for reading, please give me the job)
Sometimes the subheadings are that bald, sometimes they’re a little more poetic. Each director approaches these documents their own way; each job is unique.
Spooky specialists
The directors I’ve worked with are, without exception, extremely talented. Each has their specialities, such as comedy, cinematography, or magical realism. My job is to capture their vision, expressed in the ideal version of their voice.
A lot of directors are also writers, so a lot of them write their own treatments, a proportion that’s only increasing in an age of ever-tighter budgets and, of course, AI. We’ll get to that.
My experience has been that working with a writer gives the director a number of advantages.
Directors are often pressed for time working out some of the logistics of the shoot, and that’s if they’re not in the middle of another job. Treatments have tight turnarounds, typically less than a week from the briefing call, and the words need to be turned around in a couple of days, often over a weekend.
So a director often won’t have the time to write a treatment to the exacting standard required to land the job. But beyond that, being a great filmmaker doesn’t necessarily mean you’re necessarily the right choice to pitch your ideas, and yourself, in a written document.
When you hire someone like me, you get an expert at teasing the director’s ideas out, interrogating them, generating fresh angles, and shaping it all into a cohesive, compelling pitch.
To me, it’s much more than simply transcribing the director’s proposed approach. It’s a true collaboration, where I work hand-in-hand with the director to nail down what excites them about the project.
Beyond simply capturing the director’s vision, I’m crystallising it. My goal is to ensure that the director feels they couldn’t have put it better themselves.
The summoning
The first I tend to hear about a job is when the production company reaches out to see if I’m free over the next couple of days. If I am, they’ll send over the advertising agency brief and/or scripts and I begin thinking about how this director will work with the material.
Ideally, I’ll also be sent a recording of the briefing meeting the director had with the advertising agency team. From that, I get more of an insight into what’s driven the creative decisions, I get the director’s initial response to the material, and I see how the agency responds to that response.
Melding minds
I then jump on a call with the director and we brainstorm. I learn where their personal connections and enthusiasms lie, so we can highlight why these spots are destined to be jewels in their showreel. We find where their background, strengths and unique selling points fit into the pitch, pinpointing their expertise and experience so that the client can feel assured that our director is the ideal person to deliver on this specific material.
The director often talks about past experiences that resonate with the campaign, personal creative bonds. I might make observations or offer up experiences of my own as suggestions to include. We throw ideas back and forth; some stick, some don’t. We play with some ideas for phrasing. Dare I say it, sometimes we even have fun.
Bringing it to life
And then, I write. Might wind up 2000 words, might be 5000. For an average job it’ll take me about a day to bang out a first pass.
I’ll send my first pass back to the director, and the DA will start working on sourcing imagery and laying it up. The director will probably have a round or two of notes and tweaks and we might chat a bit more to make sure we nail the details.
Then it’s back to the production company, the advertising agency, and through them, the client. With any luck, they’ll hear back and be in pre-production soon after.
Something really scary
So that’s treatment ghostwriting, a job you may not have known existed but which has been the main thing that’s been keeping the lights on recently here at Media Empire, while I continue to develop exciting new projects.
But I’m afraid I misled you at the start. Because…
Robot ghosts.
Digital ghostwriters are everywhere now. AI slop has exploded vanity publishing as everyone can get their life story told by a generative smooth-talker. And I’m sure reading your pseudoautobio written by FlatteryEngine6 is good for the ego. It’ll iron out all those kinks and quirks that make your voice you.
As you may have heard, the whole screen industry is becoming a shadow of its former self. Ad agencies are turning into AI agencies. If you’re going to get your voice ghosted in these budget-squeezed times, the cheaper, faster option seems the simple choice. Treatment writing is exactly the sort of job that the ghostbot army, the ChatGPTs and Claudes of the world, is already taking over.
My experience, though, has been that it highlights the limitations of AI for writing that comes from a personal vision. (Even AIs themselves seem to agree, but then they are by their very nature unpredictable.)
If I run a treatment’s words through an AI, it may throw up a few synonyms that I hadn’t considered, good on it. But invariably what it suggests sounds more generic, moving away from the director’s authentic voice, with a crude sense of taste and judgment.
While it may seem somewhat perverse to defend the bespoke artistry of ad makers, something is being lost if we’re reducing ads to algorithms. Without a sense of distinctive authorship, the content often feels dead. We can sense the slop, the bland flavour of homogenised everyvoice.
When everybody sounds like a robot, nothing connects with a reader better than the words of a flesh and blood individual.
Haunting for hire
No matter how good AI tools get at recycling the past into something seemingly new, the most compelling writing for a human audience will continue to come from authentic human authors. The most vital insights come from lived experience. Nothing can beat a discussion where minds meet and sparks fly; it’s deep in our biology where original ideas arise.
Being a freelance writer in the current environment is challenging, doubly so in the screen world. So this phantom has room for more hauntings.
If you’d like to discuss any type of writing with me, reach out, I’d love to have a chat, live human to live human. And if you want to engage me as your ghostly accomplice, I’d be happy to be your spirit guide.
