Using Loglines to Save Your Screenplay - FREE Film School

Using Loglines to Save Your Screenplay

A screenplay, be it a 3 hour epic or a 10 minute short, can be a complex weaving of multiple characters, dramatic events and storylines. We embark with hope and expectation, the clear seas ahead of us, blue skies above. This is going to be a fantastic adventure – what could go wrong?

Then, 6 or 60 pages in and the inspirational winds are calming. Your forward momentum stalls. The narrative is starting to drift.

You look up into the burning sun and wonder why you ever set off on this ridiculously foolhardy journey. And many questions plague your mind.

But you continue on, anyway. You just need to get to the end. You just want this to be finished somehow…

Lost

Finally, your first draft is complete. You leave it for a few days and then read it back. There’s some good bits and some bad bits. You’re not really sure if it’s any good. So you send it to a friend who replies with long rambling thoughts on what you need to do to fix it.

But this friend seems rather to be describing the script they would have written. They don’t seem to understand what it is you were trying to do. So you give it to another friend and wait. Two months later, and they still haven’t got round to reading it yet.

So you go online and ask people in forums to do a script swap – you’ll give each other feedback. You slog through their script which you think is horrible but you try to be constructive. In return, they send you some brief notes on script format and some tips which seem to be copied and pasted from a “how to” screenwriters manual.

Added to that, in the weeks since you finished the first draft, you’ve started making your own notes for a second draft which are completely at odds with all the feedback you got.

Nobody else seems to get your movie. Maybe this whole idea was misguided from the start. Maybe you should just put this down as a learning experience and start a new idea…

I thought this was about loglines

Well, it is. I just wanted to get you in the mood first.

By using a logline, all the above can be avoided, to a certain extent. A logline isn’t just a 2 sentence pitch, it can save your movie.

What is a logline anyway? Is it like the ad copy on a movie poster?

No. The catchy phrases on movie posters are called “taglines”. Here’s some examples:

Taglines

• In space, no one can hear you scream.
• One man’s struggle to take it easy.
• Who ya gonna call?
• You’ll never go in the water again.
• Escape, or die frying.
• Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail.
• The longer you wait, the harder it gets.
• There are 3.7 trillion fish in the ocean. They’re looking for one.

Can you name all the movies? Answers in the comments!

None of these taglines tell you what the movie is about. They are written to complement the image on the poster. And when an observer combines the two in their mind, the marketing folk hope he or she feels the need to know more.

Loglines

Simply put, loglines are a mini synopsis. Can you summarise your story in one or two sentences? Here an example logline:

A listless and alienated teenager decides to help his new friend win the class presidency in their small western high school, all while he must deal with his bizarre family life back home.

Can you guess the movie again? Answers in the comments (no Googling).

Christopher Lockhart is a Hollywood executive, producer and teacher and this is what he says about loglines:

“A logline conveys the dramatic story of a screenplay in the most abbreviated manner possible. It presents the major throughline of the dramatic narrative without character intricacies and sub-plots.”

Now, creating a good logline is not as easy as it sounds. I used to belong to an online forum hosted by Christopher where writers would post loglines for feedback. Long, long – sometimes heated – discussions often ensued. However…

Christopher says:

A logline must present:

• who the story is about (protagonist)
• what he strives for (goal)
• what stands in his way (antagonistic force)

In the above logline it would be:

• alienated teenager
• class presidency
• bizarre family

You can see that this really focuses in, stripping out everything from your story except the central core.

This is just for selling your script to producers, right?

Wrong.

When people send me their scripts to read for feedback, I always ask them to send me a logline instead. I can usually uncover problems in the narrative simply by reading their logline. Because most problems in a screenplay don’t arise from the complex web of plot threads and character arcs. They come from the first seed of the idea being poorly thought through.

Imagine if you were a DNA scientist and could design a seed for a tree. The seed looks fine and so you plant it. Then the tree starts to grow and it’s a twisted, ugly mess. That’s because you didn’t design that first seed right. But you don’t find out until the tree grows and it’s too late.

However, if you make sure that first seed is designed well, then the tree that grows from it will be beautiful and strong, in all its life’s complexity.

And so too your screenplay. Get that first idea for the narrative right and the screenplay that follows is more likely to grow into something brilliant.

Everything defines character

Those 3 aspects of the logline define the character that your story is about.

First question is: Who is your character?

But, remember, this isn’t separate to his or her goal, it defines the goal too.

Here’s an example of a confusing character-goal:

A life-long environmentalist decides to burn down some rainforest so she can use the land for her farm.

If someone pitched you that, you’d go “Huh? That doesn’t make sense.” Because, obviously, environmentalists don’t burn down rainforests. So we feel puzzled: what’s her motivation? Why would she do that?

I mean, you might have some amazing twist which drives the environmentalist to take this action. But it needs to be explained in the logline. Can you think of a reason why an environmentalist would take that action? Nor me.

But if you said:

A poor Peruvian farmer must illegally burn down some rainforest to feed his starving family.

Now it makes sense. From reading that sentence, we get it straight away.

But this sentence is only 2 parts of the a logline, which needs 3 parts. We’re missing the obstacle or antagonist. So, what is it that stands between the poor Peruvian farmer and his goal?

Well, the life-long environmentalist, of course.

When a poor Peruvian farmer wants to illegally burn down some local rainforest to feed his starving family, he finds himself going head to head with a wealthy American environmentalist.

Something like that (I’m making this up as I write this article). I think you can get a pretty clear picture of what the movie is going to be, based on that sentence. If I pitched that to a producer, she would immediately know what the story was.

Character, character, character

Because the Peruvian farmer is poor, he must take action to solve his problem. He decides to burn the forest to feed his family.

So, what do we know about this Peruvian farmer? He’s poor, he is dedicated to providing for his wife and children and he’s prepared to break the law to achieve that goal.

Because of his character, he finds himself opposed by the environmentalist. The point I make here is that the obstacle isn’t just a random event in his path. No, the obstacle is defined by his actions (which define his character).

In other words, the protagonist always creates their own problem/s.

So you see, the logline (and the screenplay that follows) is ultimately a definition of a character. The whole logline, not just the first part.

If you get this right before you start writing your screenplay, you have a far far better chance of writing a good one. because this logline then becomes the map that saves you from getting lost in the wide wide ocean of possibility.

This Week’s FREE film School Exercise

Even if you intend to film this yourself, and have no intention of pitching it to anyone, I recommend you go through this process. This really helps you to strengthen your screenplay from the first seed, and saves weeks months or years in development.

Do you have a few film ideas that you hope to develop but don’t know where to start? Then takes those ideas and try to write loglines. This process will really weed out the good from the bad ideas. And it will show you which ideas you truly connect with.

I’ve just written a pretty strong logline in the time it’s taken me to write this article (about 2 hours). That shows you how quickly it can be done.

How long does it take you to write a 100 minute screenplay? 6 weeks? 6 months? And only then do you discover all the problems you could have fixed by spending 2 hours writing a logline first.

Once you use this process, you discover the only obstacle between you and your finished screenplay is your lack of knowledge about the character you want to write about.

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