If we don’t know who the character is, their name only adds words to the logline that you could be using for something else. The simplest jobs can have dynamic edges, like a “knife-juggling waiter” or a “counselor addicted to gambling.” Use contrasts where you can to give your protagonist some depth in only a word or two.įor the most part, and plenty of successful loglines have broken this rule, don’t use proper names for your protagonists. Even telling us he’s a young waiter doesn’t do much for his character. Create Strong Protagonistsĭon’t just tell us that your protagonist is a waiter - that’s boring. So, now that we have our formula of logline elements established, here’s how to approach the actual creation of your logline. But the secret to breaking the rules successfully is knowing them in the first place. You can, and clearly should, break the rules when you know what you’re doing. In our list of loglines below, we’re going to look largely at instances of rule-breaking. Writing a good tagline is a process all on its own. This tagline is just an advertising quip - it doesn’t identify the key elements of the film the way a logline does. One of my favorite taglines comes from Jaws: You’ll never go in the water again. A tagline is a joke, a quip, a quote, or a warning you usually see on movie posters and advertisements once they’re in circulation (or about to be). Loglines sell scripts to producers taglines sell movies to audiences. Note that loglines sometimes get confused with taglines, which aren’t the same thing. It’s the heart of your efforts to get your film produced, so it needs to capture everything your project will be. Your logline will be the phrase you toss around over and over in every email, phone call, bar conversation, and, yes, ride in the elevator. The logline is full of direct, descriptive words that any of us can grasp and quickly assemble into a horrifying concept. There are no complicated phrases, no flowery description, and no elevated ideas. You see: even that teeny paragraph is too long, hence the formula, and hence the concision. This antagonist motivates (or incites) law enforcement to try to catch him, but to do this, they need insight into his mind, so the lucky winner is our protagonist, who has to take the action of seeking help from another disturbed cannibal. There’s a serial killer who skins people on the loose. We can unpack this a little to see how the gears work. Inciting incident: “serial killer who skins his victims.”Īnthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.Action: “must receive the help of an incarcerated and manipulative cannibal killer to help catch another serial killer”. cadet must receive the help of an incarcerated and manipulative cannibal killer to help catch another serial killer, a madman who skins his victims. Let’s look at an example from The Silence of the Lambs:Ī young F.B.I. They are a tried-and-true tool that most box office successes don’t try to reinvent. This straightforward sentence reduces all the complexity and nuance of your script into a digestible takeaway that makes it simpler for the various brokers who bring movies to life to move big, beautiful, ungainly scripts around. The logline for The Sound of Music : “A woman leaves an Austrian convent to become a governess to the children of a Naval officer widower.” Image via 20th Century Fox.Ī logline is a simple descriptive sentence that identifies the inciting incident (motivation and/or risks), the protagonist, the primary action, and the antagonist.
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