What a treatment settles, and what a deck adds
A treatment answers a question the script does not: not what happens, but how it will be seen. It reads the story back to the people who own it and tells them what the director noticed — the scene that is really the film, the character who is quieter than written, the colour the whole thing turns on. Then it says how that reading becomes pictures: the camera's temperament, the light, the locations, the pace of the cut, the casting, the music. And it says, without quite saying it, why this director and not the other two on the list. A treatment that does only the first of those is a book report. One that does only the second is a mood board with sentences. The good ones do all three in a voice the reader can hear, because the voice is the audition.
A deck is the treatment made visible. Each idea in the prose gets a page, and each page gets a picture that proves the idea is possible: a reference frame for the light, a found still for the location, a generated frame for the moment the script describes and nothing on earth has photographed yet. For a commercial the deck also carries the structure of the spot beat by beat, the product moment, and the formats; for a feature it carries the look of each act and the key sequence as a board. The deck is what gets forwarded, so it is the deck, not the treatment, that most of the decision-makers actually read.
The thing both are quietly doing is making promises. Every generated frame in a deck is a claim that the production can make that frame: that cast, that wardrobe, that room, that lens. On the day the award is confirmed, those claims become the brief, and a frame that was made as a mood rather than as a plan becomes the first problem of pre-production. That is the reason to build the deck the way the film will be built, which is what the rest of this page is about.
From script to deck, step by step
Read the script as structure first. Before any picture, know the scenes, the cast, the locations and the beats — the same breakdown a production makes later, done early and lightly. In PREVIZ a script goes into Script and comes back as scenes and elements; a brief with no script yet goes onto an Infinitum board as a paragraph and references, where a director agent proposes a sequence to argue with. Either way the deck is built on a structure, not on a feeling about one. The script breakdown page covers that stage.
Decide the look, then lock it. Gather references for light, colour and texture, and settle them into a look the whole deck will share. Then make the decisions the shoot will have to honour — what the lead looks like, what she wears in the key scene, what the apartment is — and lock them from a reference image each. This is the step most decks skip, and it is the one that decides whether the frames on page four and page nine are the same film. The character consistency page explains why a lock is the mechanism and a style prompt is not.
Make the lookbook frames under the locks. Now generate: one frame per idea in the treatment, each made with the cast, wardrobe and world references attached and graded against them. Keep selects and rejects on the record. A generated frame is not a photograph of a set, and a deck should not pretend otherwise; but a frame made under a lock is a frame the production can make again, and that is the honest kind of promise.
Board the key sequence at pitch density. Three or four frames per scene for the sequence the pitch hangs on — enough to show the cut, not enough to schedule a day. Timing it in the board's timeline, even roughly, catches the sequence that reads beautifully on a page and runs ninety seconds in a thirty-second spot. The script to storyboard page covers the two densities; a deck wants the first.
Sign the hero. One frame is the deck: the image the client will remember, the one that will become the key art if the job is won. Make it in Keyframe at the resolution a printed page or a projected room needs — Keyframe's progressive upscale chain exists for exactly this frame — and let the rest of the deck inherit it.
Lay the pages out and send one link. Treatment prose, lookbook frames, the board, the cast, the ask. The deck can leave as a PDF, and it should also exist as something the reader can open without an account and comment on, so the agency's notes come back against the frame they are about rather than in an email thread about page six.
What goes wrong, and where PREVIZ does it
The deck that cannot be shot. A frame with a lens that does not exist and a camera inside a wall, approved by a client who cannot know that. If the frame is a mood, label it one; if it is the plan, place the camera before it is signed. The 3D previs page is what placing it means.
Twelve pages, twelve films. Every frame handsome and none of them related — a different lead, a different palette, a different decade — because each was prompted alone. A lock and a shared look fix this at the source; a designer's grade over the top does not.
The treatment that restates the script. Four pages of synopsis before a single decision. The reader has the script. Tell them what you saw in it.
The win that starts from zero. The deck is forwarded, the job is awarded, and pre-production opens a new folder, because the deck was a document and not a project. The references are re-found, the lead is re-cast in pictures, the sequence is re-boarded, and the first thing the client notices is that the film no longer looks like the deck.
In PREVIZ the deck is a view of the production rather than a thing beside it. The idea starts on an Infinitum board; the look and the cast are locked once and attached to every frame in every room; the hero is signed in Keyframe; the key sequence is boarded and timed in Storyboard; a review link lets the agency or the client read and comment without an account; and when the job is won, the production package — the scene index, the cast and continuity sheet, the boards and the sequence — is built from the same project the pitch was. Every frame keeps the record of what it was made from, which answers the question a client eventually asks. The rooms are open on every plan and priced by credits. What the platform does not do is write the treatment: the reading of the script, and the voice it is told in, are the director's, and a deck full of perfect frames with nothing noticed in it still loses to one with a point of view. On a commercial, the previs for commercials page picks up where the award leaves off.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between a treatment and a pitch deck?
A treatment is prose: how the director reads the script, what the film will feel like, how it will be shot, and why this director. A pitch deck is the treatment laid out as pages with pictures — a lookbook of reference and generated frames, a board for the key sequence, the cast and the world. Agencies and producers usually ask for the deck and read the treatment inside it.
How long should a treatment be?
As long as it takes to make the reader see the film, and no longer. A commercial treatment is often six to twelve pages; a feature treatment can run to thirty. The length that matters is the reader's: a producer reads the first page and the pictures, so the first page carries the idea and every picture has to be the film.
Should the frames in the deck be generated or found?
Both, labelled honestly. Found references say what the film is like; generated frames say what the film is. The useful discipline is to make the generated frames from the same cast, wardrobe and world references the production will lock, so the picture that wins the job is one the shoot can repeat rather than a mood that has to be re-invented after the award.
What happens to the deck once the job is won?
In most workflows it is a PDF that nobody opens again, and the production starts from scratch. In PREVIZ the board, the locked references, the signed hero frame and the sequence are the production — the deck was a view of them — so the handoff is a share link to the same project, and the first day of pre-production continues the pitch instead of restarting it.