After her brother’s death, a college student must track down someone who created a deadly video streaming online who kills anyone who watches it.

If you drop everything in front of the comma it creates a simpler phrase without the unnecessary pause. Also it forces a reader to wonder about “her” when no protagonist has yet been mentioned, and you want a reader to comprehend the nature of the story without having to stop and think about it. Yes, this will remove the personal nature of the conflict from the logline, but that can be mentioned later in the sentence or even removed from the logline altogether, and included in a synopsis or just the script.

After that you’re still left with an awkward phrase using the word “who” three times, one of which doesn’t even make sense as it’s referring to a video and not a person, plus the words “someone” and “anyone.” This is simply too vague for a reader to connect emotionally, even with the brother’s demise…we don’t know anything about the brother, the protagonist sister student, the antagonistic cause of the online disturbance, or other possible victims. We have nothing to draw us into the story and make us care.

The balance needing to be struck is to craft a single and typically unbroken sentence which is specific enough to interest us, but not so detailed that we lose sense of the story. It should contain the protagonist, antagonist, conflict, and stakes in this same balance. You have all these details present but they’re too broad to distinguish the drama of the situation. The length is good, but just doesn’t provide enough information to be compelling. Let’s look at this attempt:

“A struggling college student must track down the source of a deadly streaming video which kills everyone who watches it, including her younger brother.”

It has an equal number of words and all the same details as the previous version, so what are the differences: adding the word “struggling” to the description of your protagonist as a college student places her in a difficult position at the beginning of the story, so to then add her little brother’s death AND a quest to essentially save the world, that’s really stacking the deck against your hero…which is a good thing, dramatically speaking. It’s what viewers want, to see somebody win against difficult odds. Also notice that adding the word “younger” to her brother makes him seem more vulnerable, and her more protective…thus having failed to protect him, she MUST protect others. Goes towards motivation and helps a reader see the scope of your entire script through just the logline.

Speaking of the brother, it works to include that detail here because of the added personal nature of the story, as mentioned above, but also, look at the structure of the logline — you could easily remove everything after the comma and it still makes sense, just like removing everything before the comma in the previous version. While I have consistently been an advocate for loglines written in a single sentence without pauses due to punctuation, there are always exceptions which are not weakened but strengthened by bending this rule. This is such a case because without the detail of the brother, a reader might easily ask the question, why this particular college student? And they’d be right to ask that, so mentioning her brother at the end makes that question unnecessary.

Along with the addition of “struggling,” changing “someone” to “source” and “anyone” to “everyone” makes the details pointed and clear enough while still lacking over-specificity. “Someone” sounds like there isn’t a real antagonist, like it’s just a vague figure who may not even actually exist within the world of the story, while a “source” sounds as though there is definitely an evil person or entity responsible, and therefore a villain to be defeated. And though “anyone” being in danger doesn’t seem like much of a threat, “everyone” dying is quite a major problem and should certainly be addressed.

The thing about loglines is, they’re short…every word counts. Less is more. Get as many ideas across in as small a window as possible.

Plus, didn’t they already make this movie?