![]() In order to figure out what was happening on television, there was basically one resource: a magazine called TV Guide. įirst, a quick bit of history, where do loglines come from?īack in the days before we had Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and DVRs and all this fancy stuff that we have now, we had this crazy thing called television. If you want to learn how to write a logline, you first have to truly understand what a logline is, and that begins with understanding what a logline does. You’re probably not surprised that I disagree with this idea. If you browse the internet, there are 50,000 different formulas where people tell you this is how to write a logline, as if there was a simple rule that you simply had to follow that would make a one-size-fits-all logline that would work for any story. So is that the kind of logline you want to write? They don’t usually make you really feel anything. We see crappy ones all the time on Netflix and Amazon. It’s a short sentence that tells what a movie is about. Sure, we all technically know what a logline is. ![]() This week we’re going to be answering a really great question: how do you write a logline?īut before we start talking about how to write a logline, I think it’s pretty important to define what it actually is. ![]() Stereotypes: A New Look At The Hero’s Journey Selling a TV Series: The Role of the Show Bible.Winning Time: How To Adapt a True-Life Story.Top Gun: Maverick – All Writing Is Political.How to Transition from Playwriting to Screenwriting.The Bear: The First Image and the Opening Sequence.Novel, Memoir & NonFiction Writing Classes.active) goal in the context of that premise. Logline 6 also has no goal, except for survival, which is a reactive (vs. Logline 4 has no goal, no urgency and no stakes. Logline 2 has an urgent, high-stakes goal, but it’s dull because there is no irony to the connection between the hero and the goal. Loglines 2, 4, and 6 are almost movie premises. And there is an irony to the hero particularly having the central goal (for example in CHILDREN OF MEN Clive Owen’s protagonist is a “former” activist). They each have an urgent, high-stakes goal (even if the stakes are purely emotional, like in HER). Notice how they all fit the logline tests above? They each have irony. Which ones are the real ones? 1, 3, and 5 are SWISS ARMY MAN, CHILDREN OF MEN, and HER, respectively. LOGLINE 6: A group of teenagers go camping and a demon terrorizes them on the site of an ancient massacre. LOGLINE 5: In a near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need. LOGLINE 4: A disaffected young man returns to his hometown and revisits his relationships with the most important people in his life. LOGLINE 3: In 2027, in a chaotic world in which women have become somehow infertile, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea. ![]() LOGLINE 2: A CIA agents travels to Europe to stop an international arms dealer from selling a nuclear weapon. LOGLINE 1: A hopeless man stranded on a desert island befriends a dead body and together they go on a surreal journey to get home. Half of the examples below are from real movies, half are not. Let’s compare and contrast some loglines. It may seem self-evident, but many of the scripts we receive here at ScriptArsenal do not pass these logline tests. We have a hero, they have a goal, that goal is high-stakes and urgent, and there is a central irony to that particular person having that specific goal. Let’s breakdown why:Ī great logline has a couple of key factors. The problem with NOT doing this is you can miss sign-posted problems with your concept. When sitting down to write a new script, not every screenwriter stops and first writes out the logline, the one or two sentence pitch for their movie, to test their logline.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |