A mute street performer with PTSD, trapped and on the run in war-torn Europe, must use his wits and talents, and enlist the help of the French Resistance, to change the course of the second World War.
Castler MediaLogliner
A mute street performer with PTSD, trapped and on the run in war-torn Europe, must use his wits and talents, and enlist the help of the French Resistance, to change the course of the second World War.
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1: A man living with PTSD-inflicted mutism… this line is hard to read and should be changed.
2:?Trapped and on the run… These are two opposite situations. If you are trapped you can’t move, if you are on the run you are on the move. You should pick one or the other.
3: must use his wits and talents… This line should be dropped, it tells us nothing about the story.
4: to change the course of the second world war… This should be dropped.
What’s missing from this logline is what specifically the lead character must do. Kill an important Nazi General? Help a German scientist defect? Build a time machine and kill Hitler? When you give us the lead character’s specific goal, we won’t have to be told that it will change the course of the second world war, we will know it from reading the logline.
Hope this helps, good luck with this!
Agreed with Richiev.
There is very little detail specified that describes the plot.
Give your story a starting point and and end point, in other words define the plot at hand with an inciting incident and goal. In the original logline the MC could be in any country at any point in time between 1939 and 1945, but it’s important for the reader to understand when and where a story takes place and why the character is motivated to achieve his or her goal.
>>>to change the course of the second World War.
I agree with Richiev that this ought to be dropped. ?Unless, the character has a very specific objective goal, a very specific — and unique — plan ?for changing the course of the war. ?Like Alan Turing did in “The Imitation Game”. ?His very specific objective goal was to crack the Nazi Enigma code. ?And his very specific — and unique plan — for achieving that goal was to build a calculating machine, a primitive computer.
And the bonus feature of that film?is that it was based on a ?real character, real history, the work of the British code crackers at Blenchley Park. ?Is this story based on a real character, on a real episode in World War II?
New Logline:
Inflicted with PTSD from a young age, a mute street performer is abandoned by his troupe as France becomes occupied by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Faced with the choice to escape to neutral Switzerland or fight, he joins the French Resistance as a code-breaker and infiltrates the Nazi regime. His tactics shift when he learns what’s happening to the countless civilians going missing.
Both the new log line and the original give the impression this is a big story with lots of moving parts. ?But at it’s heart this feels like a story about a mute guy trying to tell people about concentration camps. ?I think if you focus on that you’ll hook your audience and get your message across.