A block of beats grouped together is a sequence, and the layer where you lay those sequences out and read them is the treatment. Few words in screenwriting drift as much as that second one — in some rooms it means a long prose summary, in others a scene-by-scene outline — so rather than legislate it, this note starts from what a sequence is and what one needs before it reads as a whole.
A feature is made of dozens of beats. Read one at a time, the story disappears — all trees, no forest.
So beats get grouped into blocks, roughly two to a block. Each block answers one question, and that block is a sequence.
How many you get is not fixed. It follows from where the structure you chose puts its beats and from the sequence count you pick (fewer · normal · more). It usually lands between 6 and 10, and at normal every structure comes out at 8.
The layer where you lay those sequences out and read them is the treatment. When the synopsis is too far away and the script is too close, this is where you can see how the story actually moves.
The important part is that this layer is not authored separately. What a writer edits is the beats; the blocks are derived from them. A block boundary always falls where a beat already ends — beats are never split to make a block come out even. The plot stays the original.
Read it from the top down. The writer works on the beats at the top; a sequence is several of them taken together, and the vertical rules mark where the grouping breaks. A grouping never breaks anywhere the beats do not — beats are never split to make a block. Scenes fill in beneath. A feature runs to about a hundred of them and they vary in length, so each layer down is cut finer than the last. The figure shows a real result, Save the Cat 15 at Normal density, and each cell is as wide as the length written there. The scene count and lengths are an evenly spread example.
| Layer | Question it answers | Unit you read |
|---|---|---|
| Synopsis | What is this story about? | The whole film |
| Plot | Where does it change direction? | One beat |
| Treatment | What does this stretch ask, and what does it cost? | A group of beats |
| Scene list / script | Who does what, here? | One scene |
The common confusion is treating a treatment as a short script. Do that and you get a run of scene summaries with no blocks at all. What separates the treatment from the script is not length but unit: it looks at groups, not scenes.
For a block to earn its place, three things have to be there.
Stories driven by accumulation change the second item. In a structure like Temporal Variation, which advances by gathering rather than by large events, the block asks not what was lost but what has gathered. Same slot, different ruler.
The first item collapses most often, because a plot summary moves into the question's seat. "He quits his job" is a summary, not a question. Once summaries move in, the block loses its direction.
In Movie Kick this layer lives in the Treatment tab of the plot stage. Set up your beats and the blocks derive themselves, each arriving with a proposed question and stake. Edit a beat and the blocks follow — the point is to stop two layers from holding two different stories.
The prose you write here carries forward as the ground for that stretch when you build the scene list. Skip the treatment and write scenes first, and you tend to end up with pages that each work and together go nowhere in particular.