From the course: Creating a Short Film: 02 Writing

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Creating a logline

Creating a logline

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 02 Writing

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Creating a logline

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- A logline is a sentence that sums up your movie. This is not to be confused with a tagline, which is a marketing statement that's just catchy, like Alien's famous tagline, "In space, "no one can hear you scream." But this isn't really telling you anything about the story of the film, really. A logline, on the other hand, is a one sentence summation of what the film is about. Think about how movies are summed up in cable TV listings, or IMDb, in the newspaper, or Netflix or whatever. These are essentially loglines. When writing a short film, or a feature film, I always recommend starting with the logline. This really is the first step in my mind to writing a story. Now, one little sentence sums up all of the main elements of the story. It briefly describes the protagonist, it describes their objective and their obstacles. The logline, Heather, my co-writer and I, came up with for The Assurance was, "Alone in the wilderness, "a child struggles to understand the role her "sister plays…

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