Build a Commercial Around Choreography Rather Than Dialogue
Build a Commercial Around Choreography Rather Than Dialogue
A treatment that says “an energetic dance sequence carries the spot” has described a temperature, not a scene. Nobody reading it can tell you what the bodies do first, what makes them do something else, or what is different when the music stops. That's the gap this piece is about.
Movement can carry a commercial without dialogue, but only if the movement changes something. Your job on the page is not to choreograph counts. It is to state a starting condition, name the relationship that alters it, and describe an arrival that the audience can see coming out of the bodies rather than out of the edit.
Here is the test before anything else. Write two sentences: the state of the scene at the top, and the state at the end. If the second is the first with better adjectives, you have a mood reel, not a movement phrase.
Give movement a situation to change
Start with a physical situation, not a genre. Are these people working independently in the same room? Resisting a rhythm the others have settled into? Copying someone without meaning to? Passing something from hand to hand? Each of those is a condition an audience can read in a few seconds, and each one can be broken.
Then say where the product sits inside that situation. Not as a logo at the end — as an object with a job. A shoe has a job in whether someone crosses the room. A phone has a job in whether attention moves. A notebook has a job in whether work can be handed over complete. If the product could be removed from the scene and nothing about the movement would change, the brief hasn't reached the choreography yet.
Dance can be impressive and still be decoration. The test is whether the sequence ends differently because of something a body did. Three good closers landing on a beat is a picture. A gesture that gets answered is a scene.
For the rest of this piece I'll use one invented situation, because it's easier to be precise about a real particular than about “energy.” It has not been rehearsed, shot, or run with performers. Treat it as a written exercise.
Three people work at three separate tables in one room, each in a notebook. The first finishes and closes hers. A few seconds later the second closes hers. Then the third. Three soft sounds, no one looking up. Nothing crosses a table edge. That's the whole starting condition, and it's already a little sad, which is useful.
Write the phrase as development, not a list of steps
Now build it in stages, and let each stage change the situation rather than add to it.
Stage one: isolated routine. The first worker, call her A, is finished, and so are the other two, B and C. A has nothing to do with her hands. She taps her closed cover twice with two fingers — not to signal anything in particular, just an idle leftover of working. Nobody acknowledges the tap.
Note what this gives you. A wants something she can't say: that she's done and nothing follows. The tap is her failure to sit still. It will become the mechanism of the commercial, but it starts as a dead end, which is why it will read as an accident rather than a device.
Stage two: interrupted imitation. B hears the tap. She repeats the same two taps on her own closed cover, a beat late. This is the load-bearing beat, and it is not synchronization. It's copying, and the copying does work: C hears the second tap and looks up. C doesn't tap. The gesture has been answered and handed on, and the only thing that has changed for C is her attention.
Stage three: joint arrival. B slides her closed notebook across the gap toward C. C's hand comes down and stops it. C opens it to the next blank page and writes. A stands, carries her own closed notebook to C's table, sits, and opens it. C's own notebook stays shut where she closed it, which is the cleanest available sign that her attention has moved somewhere else.
Read the end state against the start and you can count the change. Top: three closed notebooks on three tables. Bottom: three notebooks on one table, two of them open, and the gesture that began as a nervous leftover has become an offer.
Keep the sequence at this level of detail and no finer. You are writing what a reader needs to understand why the arrival differs from the beginning. Individual counts, tempo, weight, and the exact shape of a hand belong to the person who will stage it. A treatment that specifies every beat leaves a choreographer nothing to solve and gives a producer no way to judge the idea.
Use relationship words only when the actions earn them. Imitation is fair here because B does the same thing A did. Handoff is fair because a hand leaves an object and another hand stops it. Synchronization would not be fair yet — nobody in this phrase does anything at the same time as anyone else, and calling it synchronization would be describing the cut you plan to make, not the movement you've written.
One more discipline while you're still in draft: don't let the object claim agency. The tap is a person's gesture that a cover makes audible. Write “the notebook calls the next worker over” and you've promised a magic notebook, which is a different commercial and probably a worse one.
Separate the performers' phrase from its presentation
Camera and sound can support this phrase or fake it, and the difference is worth stating in the treatment.
Start with what must stay visible together. Once, early, show all three tables and the gaps between them in a single frame. The audience can't feel a table edge being crossed if they never learned where the tables were. That one wide or slow moving shot is doing structural work: it establishes the distance that stage three will collapse.
The taps should be shown in a frame where both people are visible, or at minimum where you can see B hear it and decide. The moment of copying is the whole idea. Cut from A's cover to B's cover on the second tap and it will look rhythmic and mean nothing, because the cut delivered the gesture, not the hand.
The handoff deserves a closer view, but only after a wider shot has shown the notebook actually crossing the gap. A close-up on the receiving hand asserts travel rather than showing it. And here's where a cut can lie to you: cut on the release and the pickup, and you can make two performers look like they completed one continuous exchange when they were never in the same frame. If the exchange is the point, keep it whole.
Sound has three distinct jobs here, and they aren't interchangeable.
If you use music, let it establish a pulse. The three closing sounds of the opening will land off that pulse, and the audience will hear three people keeping their own time in a room with one clock. That's useful. What isn't useful is a percussion hit landing on each tap. Do that and the tap becomes the score's beat instead of a person's gesture, and B's copying stops reading as a choice.
Consider dropping the music at the moment B's hand leaves the notebook, so the only sounds left are the slide and C's palm. Then bring it back when C's pen starts. That's a proposal, not a rule; the principle is that a dropped score exposes an action, while a continuing score covers it.
And don't let music answer the movement. If a note replies to every tap, the room seems to be responding to these people, which is a claim you didn't make and may not want.
The general warning is this: an edit rhythm is not a bodily progression. A fast, well-cut sequence can make three unrelated closures feel coordinated. That's a promise the bodies haven't made, and an audience will feel the difference even if it can't name it, usually as a commercial that was nice to look at and meant nothing.
Describe the arrival and the unresolved physical question
State what the phrase leaves changed, in plain terms. Here, the work stops being finished. A closed notebook is a thing that's done; the phrase reopens one with somebody else's hand. The idle tap becomes an invitation. Those are two changes from the same small set of actions, which is a good sign that the phrase is doing enough.
Then list what has to be assessed rather than asserted.
The table surface matters. A notebook slides across laminate and drags and spins across unfinished wood, and a treatment that promises a clean glide has promised a set it may not get. Decide whether the surface is part of the brief.
The notebook's pages have to survive the trip. A book that slides shut on itself, or opens to the wrong page, or spills a pen, changes the tone of the whole arrival. Somebody has to hold it or the pages have to behave.
The gap width is a meaning question, not just a staging one. If the tables are far enough apart that no one can reach across, the slide is a small piece of engineering that the two of them achieve. If they're close enough to touch, it's a courtesy, and the arrival loses some of its force. Choose deliberately.
C's transition from receiving to writing is the riskiest beat. She has to open a stranger's notebook and put her pen on the page, and that has to read as continuing the work rather than defacing it. A choreographer will find that in a look, a hesitation, or the angle of the wrist. The treatment shouldn't try to.
A's arrival is the genuinely open question, and it's worth preserving as open. She stands and joins uninvited. Whether that reads as welcome or intrusive depends entirely on pace and on how the other two register her. Don't answer it in the treatment. Hand it over.
Now, abilities. Write requirements as things to assess, not as feats already secured. The phrase as described needs three performers comfortable with close camera work, a controlled object handoff, and small specific gestures that read at a distance — no particular dance training. If you're tempted to add a catch, a spin, or a flourish in the handoff, ask whether it expresses the change or just proves a skill. A performer sliding a notebook and stopping it with a flat palm might be the strongest version of this beat, and it's also the one anybody can do.
If a slide across the gap turns out to be fragile to stage, the simpler route is B standing and carrying the notebook to C. It's easier, and it says something different: I am bringing you something. The slide says the object can travel between us without either of us leaving. Pick whichever meaning you're actually after rather than letting the set make that choice for you.
If your treatment names a dance style or draws on a recognizable movement tradition, credit it and identify where it comes from. A named form isn't a mood word; it's somebody's practice.
And if you're building on an existing commercial, get the authorized clip and a first-person account from the choreographer and director before you start reasoning about timing. A memory of a spot you saw twice is not a timing source.
What to hand the choreographer
Write your progression, cut the fake version, and mark the beats where the audience must see a cause. Then write down the physical questions you couldn't settle on the page.
For this phrase, those questions are short. Which beat turns A from someone finishing her own work into someone offering it? How long does B hold before she copies? Does C's first mark on B's page land immediately, and does A watch it happen or miss it?
The choreographer doesn't need your counts. They need to know what changes, what must stay visible, and where you're still unsure — including the one you're least sure about, which is whether A's arrival is an invitation or an intrusion. Ask them. That answer is the commercial.
Frequently asked questions
What test tells me whether a movement-led commercial is a scene or only a mood?
Write the state at the top and the state at the end. If the second is the first with better adjectives, it is a mood reel. The movement has to change the situation, and the sequence should end differently because of something a body did.
How does the product belong inside the choreography?
Give it a job in the physical situation, not just a logo at the end. If the product could be removed and nothing about the movement would change, the brief has not reached the choreography yet.
Why is B copying A's taps not synchronization?
Nobody does anything at the same time as anyone else. Imitation is fair because B does the same thing A did, a beat late; synchronization would describe a planned cut or edit rhythm rather than the movement written on the page.
What camera and sound choices help the movement read as cause and effect?
Show all three tables and the gaps once early in one frame. Show the taps where B can be seen hearing and deciding, not cut between covers on the tap. Show the notebook crossing the gap in a wider shot before a closer view. Let music establish pulse but do not hit percussion on each tap or let music answer the movement.
What should a treatment hand to the choreographer?
The progression, the fake version cut, and the beats where the audience must see a cause. Then write the physical questions left unsettled, including which beat turns A from finishing to offering, how long B holds before copying, and whether A's arrival reads as invitation or intrusion. The choreographer does not need counts.