Specimen
Tim AucoinLogliner
An amnesiac who wakes up chained to a table in a mysterious room must uncover why sinister doctors are performing grisly operations on him.
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Not a bad logline. But the story seems less compelling. Just to find out why he is being cut up seems a little weak. Can probably be told well in your story, but lacks logline punch. Plus being amnesiac doesn’t seem to impact on the story you are describing.
Hello, the amnesiac who wakes up and must understand what happened is a promising beginning (and maybe that’s why I read it almost 3 times since I joined this site). What is the most important is to include in the logline a sketch of the plot, what we will SEE in the movie, or a very original element that can really rise the curiosity of the reader. You have a good beginning but you need to be more specific about the rest of the movie.
Good luck.
The wake up in a mysterious room inciting incident has been used many times only it presents a problem if used incorrectly.
According to this logline the MC wakes up in a room on frame one which means this is the normal day to day of his life in this story. Whilst an un usual normality by most standards it is the established “norm” for the MC. As such you need a secondary inciting incident after he wakes up to motivate him to take action or else waking up becomes a vague inciting incident because we don’t know what changed in his life as a result.
Consider “The Cube” a similar premise without the doctors the MCs wake up in a room – the norm, then one of them is gruesomely killed – the inciting incident, they must now take action to save their lives.
Secondly making the MC an amnesiac can help in the writing but doesn’t work well as a character description. If he is an amnesiac how can he know he is an amnesiac unless he is told he is?
This means after waking up he can’t tell he is an amnesiac on his own.
Lastly the goal in the logline – “…must uncover why sinister doctors are performing grisly operations on him.” is not a strong enough goal. Once he discovers why they are doing the operations then what? He will simply willingly comply as all he needed was for them to give him a good enough reason?
I think best to specify that he must stop them from carrying out any further operations as appose to just finding out why they are doing so.
Hope this helps.
If I awake chained to the table, my first thought isn’t “Why are they doing this” my thought is “I must escape.”
I feel you can achieve an interesting viewpoint here. Having an amnesiac as a starting point immediately caught my attention, yet, the rest seems vague. Try to discover a very peculiar goal about his location, augment the antagonistic factor of his captors and perhaps play a mind game here with the plot. He’s an amnesiac, so throw in a higher obstacle in order for him to be able to escape as an addition or sub-plot. You have good grounds here for depth about the installation he’s in and twist it with opposites. He must escape by “remembering” a set of 3 codes which comprise a difficult ordeal in itself, worse yet after the trouble to discover them in the first place. Elaborate, tighten and let’s see what you can improve on the next round.
Thanks for the reviews guys. I haven’t been on here for awhile so it’s cool to read the feedback. Much appreciated!