Logline rules
emvshahLogliner
I did jot know where to post this question so I wrote it here. My question was: Is writing a logline same for a short film, feature film and Documentary. Very rudimentary question but I was curious.
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Basically, yeah. A basic logline introduces a protagonist, what makes him/her sympathetic, the inciting incident of the story, what the protagonists goal is and the obstacles topping him.
It’s not easy but once you get into it you can use it to flesh out your story — no matter the medium.
Hope this helps.
Very good question. ?And I beg to differ somewhat from Moses99.
The short answer is that the same logline format for a feature film usually applies for short films , as well as TV or SM (streaming media) series. ?In the case of a series, the logline usually focuses on the plot of the pilot episode that launches the series.
The purpose of a ?logline is to promote a?script?for a work of fiction? Documentaries, non-fictional stories, ?are a different species. ?AFAIK, they are pitched in terms of the subject matter, not a script because there is no script. ?(Although there may be an outline.) ?A documentary story is fully discovered and composed as the video is shot and edited.
I see your point, but I still think you can focus on the story you want to tell with a logline. While documentaries are often subject to change throughout the process you still need to sell it beforehand so, for instance;
A family man competes to break the Donkey Kong arcade high school, as the obnoxious ‘world’s greatest arcade player’ fights to keep his title.
This is a logline I just wrote for the film King of Kong, which is much more complex but this is what they set out to make the documentary about and that’s how the film came out, despite many twists. Documentaries are a tough subject because?every?one is vastly different from another.
Perhaps, but I don’t think it is required or even possible in many cases. ?Whereas loglines are (now) expected in every case for original spec scripts.
The purpose of a logline is to sell a script. ?I know we use them here to pitch ideas for scripts, send up trial ballons — and that’s another valuable opportunity the site provides. (A shout out to Karel!) ?But it was originally designed as a promotional tool, to entice producers and directors to read a finished script.
Now, I realize ?that for historical documentaries, ?a script may be written before any video is shot. ?I’ve amassed a pile of documentation for an historical drama set between 1908 and 1920. ? Enough enough to do a documentary. ?And in both cases, I would use the same logline. Because the story is done and finished — I know how it ends. ?It’s ?essentially the same “plot”.?
But in documentaries for a current ongoing events, you don’t know how it’s going to end. ?You may not even have identified a protagonist, a ?person around whom you will frame a narrative.
A logline is a concise description of a plot. ? And the formal definition of a plot, per Aristotle in the “Poetics”, is an imitation of action, ?a mimicry of real life. ? Which he differentiated from ?histories — the “written documentaries” of his day. ? ?Aristotle said dramatic stories need a plot to succeed whereas histories don’t.?
?Although documentaries must, of necessity, edit reality, they are supposed ?to make a good faith effort to ?conform to known?facts. ?Plot is under no such obligation; it’s has the freedom to bend, wantonly ignore the facts, or make up fictions to fit it’s dramatic purpose.?
Shakespeare’s “Richard III” is a fabulous — and fabulist –historical drama. ?It distorts events and warps characters for the purpose of its plot. ?A documentary of Richard III, faithful to the known historical facts, ?would present a different story, a different portrait.