

We don’t hear the character’s thoughts, or smell what they smell, or touch what they touch.

In a movie, the story can only be told through what can be seen and heard. Notice that all of these verbs are active and visual. In Hangover our hung-over bachelors sift evidence for clues. In Avatar our disabled mercenary inhabits an alien body and uses it to save his ‘new’ people from human invaders. In Pretty Woman our wealthy businessman falls in love. Any story that requires a description of many scenes and events to answer this question is a story that isn’t focused on what Aristotle so long ago called a ‘unity of action.’ Next you want to know ‘what happens.’Ī good way to know you have a major problem in your story is to be unable to answer this question in a few words. What led to the hangover? What happened during the hangover? How does it turn out? The answers to those questions form the story: beginning, middle, and end. The entire story rides on this central characteristic. The most important thing we need to know about the ‘who’ in Hangover is that they are hung-over bachelors. This all-important characteristic sets up his actions for the rest of the story.
#Logline movie examples full
The most important thing to know about the ‘who’ in Avatar is that he’s a disabled mercenary soldier, a man of action who no longer has full use of his body. That’s far more important than his name, how old he is, what kind of business he does, how many ex-wives he has, etc. The most important thing to know about the ‘who’ in Pretty Woman is that he is a wealthy businessman. The most important thing we need to know about ‘who’ the story is about and what their primary role is in the story. Three hung-over bachelors sift through the wreckage of a Las Vegas bachelor party for clues to where they misplaced the groom.A handicapped mercenary soldier inhabits an alien body to learn their culture and abandons his human body to save the aliens from his fellow mercenaries.A wealthy businessman falls in love with a hooker he hired for the weekend.Who is the story about? What happens? Who benefits? These three questions are answered in the subject, verb, and direct object positions in a sentence. Since a log line is so short, a lot of information has to be communicated in just a few words. This made it possible for studio executives to quickly scan the scripts in the library and select those that matched the type of story they wanted to film. Script readers “logged” scripts into the vault along with a ‘log line’ that was placed on the cover or on the spine of the script. Major film studios such as Warner Bros., Universal Studios, and Disney used to have script vaults in which they stored screenplays.

Since a log line is so short, a lot of information has to be communicated in just a few words A log line is a one-sentence summary of the story in your script.
