Hopefully you noticed what we didn’t include in a logline - how it ends. In the Star Wars example above that is the battle station and the evil warlord. Your logline must include the story element that hinders the main character from achieving their goal. Antagonist Force - All good storytelling includes conflict.For example, the question in Star Wars is “In a galaxy far away, will a young farmer from a desert planet master his dormant powers to save humanity from a world-destroying battle station, while also attempting to rescue a Princess from the powerful and mysterious clutches of an evil warlord?” Turn the question into a statement and you have a log line.
Goal - What does your main character want? This is often kickstarted from the inciting incident that leads to the conflict and ultimately the question of your film. Concentrate on character revealing adjectives which can give the reader a window into the main character’s emotional state, such as “a grieving father” or a “lonely architect”. Protagonist - Don’t get bogged down in names which crowd the logline (unless it’s a biopic and the person is well known). This all may sound easy, but distilling the complexities of your screenplay into two lines can often be a challenge. If your film is genre based, you may also have to include a brief set-up that gives context to the world. It’s the “tyrannical midget lord” that makes it funny.A logline is a one or two line pitch of your story structure (usually under 40 words) that clues the reader into who is driving the narrative (the protagonist), what they want (the goal) and what stands in their way of getting it (the antagonist force). For Shrek: A reclusive ogre and a chatterbox donkey go on a quest to rescue a princess for a tyrannical midget lord.ĭamn. Note: Looking up the IMDb summaries for these examples proves that anonymous posters can do better than the pros. For instance, we never did come up with a logline for Go which sounded actually funny. The world is made up of all the different fairy tale characters, like the Three Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man.Ĭlueless - An airheaded but ultimately well-meaning Beverly Hills teenager tries to “makeover her soul” in a riff on Jane Austen’s Emma.Īccept the fact that some movies aren’t so easily summarized. Shrek - A grumpy ogre and his hyperactive donkey have to save a princess. Every day, he tries to do something different, but the next morning everything resets to the way it was. Groundhog Day - Bill Murray gets stuck repeating the same day, again and again. None of these would classify as John’s Best Effort, but they get the point across: The best practice is to take existing movies and figure out how you’d boil them down if you had to write a logline. Rather, you want to distill what’s funny about the idea of your movie. You aren’t going to be able to summarize the visual gags, puns and one-liners in a logline, so don’t try. #Story logline examples movie
Whenever I write one it ends up sounding like it’s describing an action movie or drama. How do you convey the witty dialogue, the clever visual gags, the essence of the humor in a logline? So now I have 120 pages of the funniest damn stuff you’ve never seen and I have to describe it in three or four sentences.
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