Treatment

Somewhere between a one-line idea and a full script, a treatment walks through the video in order: how it opens, what happens through the middle, what the viewer feels at each turn and how it lands. It stays in plain prose, so you can read it in two minutes and tell whether the idea holds up. The format is borrowed from film and advertising, where it exists to get a concept approved before anyone spends money. On a channel it does the same job cheaply. Rewriting a treatment costs an afternoon. Discovering the structure was wrong halfway through the edit costs a week.