Movie logline movie#
Movie logline serial#

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.

Movie logline movie#

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.

Movie logline serial#

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.