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shivaLogliner
?Despite a debilitating injury, a young motorcyclist is determined to fulfill her dream of riding across the US in a motorcycle rally, but she has to compete with her boyfriend who mentors her to bounce back from a serious crash “
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Reading Logline above, I?d drop the whole bf part. She?s the protagonist and her injury is the obstacle. However, perhaps look at Loglines for movies like Million Dollar Baby as examples where the mentor-mentee roles are central to plot, if this is case in your script.
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Why is she competing with her boyfriend when he’s trying to help her? Competing how? I partially agree with Ckharper – if the story is about her injury and her achieving her goal, drop the boyfriend bit BUT most mentors have their own story to tell too (Million Dollar Baby, Eddie the Eagle, etc, etc) and if the story is actually going to have a heavy focus on the relationship between the woman and her mentor then I’d recommend leaving it in in some way.
Inciting Incident – It sounds like this is whatever happened that results in her debilitating injury – “When a serious crash leaves her unable to walk…” or similar. The more tragic this incident is, the greater the journey but it’s important we understand what it is.
Character/characteristic – “young motorcyclist” I wonder if there’s a better way to describe her. We can already assume she’s a motorcyclist based on the information already given (she has a bike crash and she wants to ride across the US). If the fact that she’s “young” is important, i.e. it makes her injury more heartbreaking or can suggest that she’s got time to achieve her dream, then potentially leave it in BUT I feel like it would be better to hint at the emotional journey here instead. Every physical journey in a movie is a representation of an emotional one too. Use this characteristic to tell us what that might. be.
Goal – Great. Simple, easy to visualise.
Antagonistic forces – Her injury… give us specifics here. This is a really key story point and the reader needs to understand the full extent of this injury to understand the story in full.
Stakes – what does she stand to lose? What happens if she doesn’t achieve her goal? We need to understand why this is so important to her.
Ticking clock (not essential) – it’s good for us to feel like there’s a time limit on this. As she’s “young” she could have 60 odd years to achieve this. Why has she got to do it now?
You’ve put the genre for this as “Adventure”… that suggests the film focuses on her journey across the US but that is actually only a very small part of it. Personally, I’d say this was more of a Drama as the bulk of the film will focus on the protagonist trying to “bounce back”.
Hope this helps in some way.
The premise holds out the promise of a lot of interesting visuals.
But taking the logline at face value:? the 1st part? says she fulfills her dream by merely running? in the rally.? The stakes seem to be endurance, not victory.? And then the 2nd half says she’s? in a? (competitive) race, not a (social) rally.
So what is it, a rally or a race?? (Technically? a rally need not to be? a race.? In fact, most rallies are social events, bikers riding together for the love of the motorcycling, not competing against each other.)
And if she got injured while racing competitively, doesn’t that mean she was already racing against her boyfriend?? So what’s the problem?? If he helps her recover, doesn’t he realize he’s aiding and abetting her competing against him?
So why would it be a wedge issue in their relationship?? Particularly since plenty of racers remain friends even though they compete against each other.? If it does threaten their relationship, whose at fault?? Isn’t it the guy’s? for being an old-fashioned sexist pig?? So doesn’t that imply that if she owns the plot, he owns the character arc because he’s the one who needs to change his attitude?
Is the emotional engine driving the movie the relationship or the racing?