In dystopian future governed by a biotechnology corporation, a young woman?s investigation into her father?s sudden disappearance leads her to believe he is a test-subject in a secret government location called ?The Factory?. When she finds herself with a group of prisoners on a vehicle heading towards an unknown location, she realizes she is on her way to The Factory and must find her father and escape before they are changed forever.

Stories about bioengineering have a good future in Sci-Fi in movies. But the problem for me in this logline is that It conceals more than it reveals.

Of course, a logline isn’t supposed to bare all — certainly not how the story ends, but we do need enough tantalizing details to get our attention, get us wanting to know more. In the case of this logline, what I think we need to know more about is the nature of the threat. What does the big bad corporation intend to do to the father and daughter that will change them forever?

Also, the logline seems long on discoveries the daughter makes but short on what she does about them (“Investigation… leads her to believe”, “…finds herself…”, “…she realizes”). A logline is about ONE major discovery the protagonist makes, a discovery that triggers her into action toward a SPECIFIC objective goal.

So what is the ONE discovery, the most important discovery the daughter makes that triggers the action that constitutes the plot?

gdawg23:

As Karel Segers points out in his logline guidelines for this site, a logline is ideally 30 words or less. That is not a number he’s pulling out of thin air. Being a quant guy, I put the guideline to a statistical test, collected and analyzed a fairly random sample of 500 loglines for movies. The median average word length was 23. Almost 88% were 30 words or shorter. None of them exceeded 40 words in length.

Your 2nd iteration is 61 words long.

So you need to look for every way to trim words, cut to the chase. For example, “investigation into her father?s sudden disappearance leads her to believe he is” = discovers. So all you need to say in the logline is something like ” When young woman discovers her father…” (You’ll fill out the details of the discovery in the script.)

And “a test-subject in a horrifying government conspiracy that takes political prisoners and turns them into genetically modified super-soldiers.” (18 words) seems to say something like “enemies of the state are punished by being genetically re-engineered as super-soldiers” (12 words)

And that’s as far as I can go at the moment as I don’t pretend to have a good handle on your concept and I don’t want to superimpose my own. I realize trimming your story down to 30 words max is no easy task. Your story seems to be packed with a lot of plot and a lot of ideas.

Best wishes. Hope this helps.

Or::

In a dystopian future, a young woman struggles to rescue her father and other political prisoners from being tortured, re-programmed, and tamed with genetic modification. (25 words)

[However, neither shorter version captures the ironical goal of the program, to transform people from fighting against the state to fighting for it.]

Or:

In a dystopian future, a young female guerilla fights to sabotage a secret program to genetically re-engineer political dissidents who fight the state into super-soldiers who fight for it.

(29 words)

Why not have her get arrested for her guerilla activity and punished with the very torture and genetic modification she has been fighting to sabotage?

She could be the ultimate human guinea pig in the trial program to prove it’s good enough to go into production with the entire prison population of rebels and dissidents. If they can crack and transform her, the person whom psychological profiling has determined is an uber-rebel, the most defiant and strong-willed of the rebel typology, they can crack and subdue anyone.

[IOW: A kick-ass female protagonist in the mold of Trinity (the Matrix) , Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)]