After uncovering a conspiracy plotted by the king a Templar is forced to intervene in the king’s plot before it leads to civil war.
solosammerLogliner
After uncovering a conspiracy plotted by the king a Templar is forced to intervene in the king’s plot before it leads to civil war.
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The latest draft is an improvement but it still lacks detail.
What will the knight actually do in order to achieve his goal?
His actions are going to be most of act 2 i.e most of the film and therefore they need to be specified in the logline. Will he fight other knights? Or investigate suspicious activity in the royal court? Or seek out spies? etc? What ever he does it needs to be specified.
Hello, your last version is not bad, but I strongly recommend?to define exaclty what you mean by “intervene”. Your movie hides behind this word.
War against who?
The premise is inevitably going to be compared to “Kingdom of Heaven”. ? Hasn’t Ridley Scott already been there, done that? ? A corrupt king intent on breaking a fragile peace, provoking war against Saladin is one of the film’s story threads.
Problem is, the king of jerusalem is the one who will be causing the war.
The logline has evolved well over the course of this thread.
I think it is now clear that the inciting incident is the discovery of the plot, perhaps then place it at the start of the logline instead of at the end?
E.g:
After he discovers a plot, a templar knight must uncover a traitor in the king of Jerusalem’s ranks to prevent the outbreak of war.
I added in that he needs to find a traitor to specify how he will prevent the war.
‘Maintain peace’ and ‘save from war’ seem the same.
A Templar knight struggles save J from war by (specific action) thwarting a conspiracy ?by the corrupt king.
Gives you a little more room for story.
True true, I’ll fix it then.
What’s a merchant knight? In medieval Europe, merchants and knights were strictly separate, the latter having far higher status than the former, and I have never come accross the term. But maybe you are envisioning a character from one of the Muslim Empires?
If I understand the premise, a merchant knight wants to prevent war because it’s bad for his business.
Well, peace is always a noble cause, but as structured, the story seems to be about a man pursuing it for his own materialistic gain. ?A main character can start out motivated ?for primarily selfish reasons, but those are insufficient goals to maintain an audience’s interest and empathy. ?Ultimately, he should be struggling for some value more important than his profit margin, for the sake of others at the expense of his own bottom line.
And isn’t that what a knight is supposed to do — fight for others, not for himself, ?for causes greater than his own gain?
In any event, as noted, the logline is short on specifics. ?It needs to indicate a specific adversary, the primary character conspiring to break the peace.
Be more specific in his actions. Impeding doesn’t seem to work. You can impede something. I don’t think you can ‘impede in’.
If you can’t be specific in action focus on motive, wants and needs.