Inflicted with PTSD from a young age, a mute street performer is abandoned by his troupe as France becomes occupied by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Faced with the choice to escape to neutral Switzerland or fight, he joins the French Resistance as a code-breaker and infiltrates the Nazi regime. His tactics shift when he learns what?s happening to the countless civilians going missing.
Castler MediaLogliner
Inflicted with PTSD from a young age, a mute street performer is abandoned by his troupe as France becomes occupied by the Nazi Wehrmacht. Faced with the choice to escape to neutral Switzerland or fight, he joins the French Resistance as a code-breaker and infiltrates the Nazi regime. His tactics shift when he learns what?s happening to the countless civilians going missing.
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At 62 words, the logline is too long and too complicated to properly evaluate. ? Please review the guidelines under “Training” at the top of the web page and condense and simplify the logline accordingly.
I can only observe that the logline gives the protagonist 2 objective goals, one specific (code-breaking), one vague (“tactics”). ? But a logline, and a plot, should have only one objective goal.
So?which one is it? ?What is the objective goal that drives the story? ?And if it’s “tactics” , then those tactics need to be spelled out. ?Exactly what are his tactics– what is his objective goal in relation to the “missing civilians”.?
And lots of civilians went missing during the war so again ?you need to be specific. ?Which missing civilians are motivating his course of action?
Hello,
the story world and the main character are interesting but the logline fails to track a strong plot. As a reader I personally feel more confused than anything else. I would recommend to focus only on the very main elements (main character, inciting incident, goal, source of conflict.
I think that you have many ideas about what there will be in the movie, this is good but it doesn’t help you to write a strong clear logline. I would suggest to write down a page (or some pages) to free your mind of all ideas, then dig into your text to extract the very main elements.
>>if you know anything about WWII, and have an imagination that can fill in some blanks, you might find some of your notes unnecessary.
Fwiw, ?it’s not a logline readers’ job to use his imagination to fill in the blanks that you deliberately leave empty. ?It’s your job to use ?your imagination to ?concisely fill in the blanks so that readers have a clear idea what the story is about.
Loglines are a sales tool, not an exercise in hide-and-seek. ?Or to mix metaphors, you don’t make a sale by hiding the game ball.
Compared to the original logline this attempt is more specific. I have a better understanding of the story from this logline. Now it’s a matter of tightening it up.
Try switching around the order:
—–
“Abandoned by his troupe in WW2 a mute street performer with PTSD joins the resistance as a code breaker, but as the battle lines near, he must overcome his trauma if he’s to crack the Nazi code and save the french town he now calls home.”
—–
If you are going to use PTSD as a character flaw it should be central to the story. He must overcome it if he’s to accomplish his goal. All the while bombs are falling from the sky.
Hope this helps, good luck with this!
Honestly, to me the PTSD angle adds nothing to the logline. You don’t connect it to the plot. If his PTSD put him into a situation where he had to overcome it for the plot to advance, then it would work, but as of now it adds nothing but more words to the logline. The same thing goes for him being abandoned, that is only his background.
The only parts important to the logline is in the second half of your version. You don’t set up an actual plot, though. The logline should depict what this character does in response to learning about the missing civilians, and his goal that drives him.
Suggestion(making up my own plot for this purpose): When a mass number of civilians go missing, a code-breaker must infiltrate the Nazi regime to gather information about their whereabouts. (~22 words)
This was the best I could come up with, it lacks a reason for him having to infiltrate, but my example serves the purpose well enough. ?This example has an inciting incident(civilians missing), and the MC’s response to that(infiltration), and then his goal(find them).
New version:
A mute street performer, abandoned by his troupe at the outbreak of WW2, must overcome his PTSD when he joins a traveling branch of the Resistance to put an end to the Nazi war crimes.
It sounds as if the concept is still being shaped and I believe the re drafts of this logline can help you identify how best to do so.
The latest draft of the logline doesn’t describe a clear enough event that motivates the main character ?to take a specific action. It specifies him being abandon, but why does that necessarily mean he MUST overcome his PTSD and MUST join the resistance and MUST end the Nazi’s war crimes?
In other words, there is a lack of causality between the events. Consider Inglorious Bastards as a recently successful WW2 film:
After a SS officer buthcers her family in front of her eyes, a scared young Jewish Woman escapes and plans her revenge to kill the highest ranking Nazi officers in the Third Riech.
The cause and effect is clear and the goal compelling.
Here is me trying to do the same with your concept as an example:
After a?Nazi officer kills his troupe, a mute Gipsy street performer suffering from PTSD must join the Resistance to find and kill the Nazi officer.
I made him a Gipsy as they were round up by the Nazi’s and shipped off to camps as well so his obstacle is greater, and this helps provide a reason for the killing initially.
Inciting incident = abandoned by his troupe.
Goal = put an end to Nazi war crimes.
Flaw = Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In the last draft of the logline there appears to be no cause and effect between the inciting incident and the goal, the goal is vague and the flaw seems to have no bearing on his ordeal.
Being abandoned by his troupe doesn’t logically mean he will then need to prevent the Nazi regime from committing war crimes – the two just don’t connect as the one event simply doesn’t motivate the other. What else could have happened to him that would clearly motivate him to need to fight the Nazis? As you didn’t seem to appreciate my last suggestions at all, I won’t make any further.
Which war crime in particular does the MC need to stop the Nazi’s from doing? According to the logline it’s all their war crimes, however to do this he would have to defeat the entire Third Reich, such an unrealistic goal makes him a delusional or crazy MC. Why not specify a particular individual, high up in the Nazi ranks, as his primary target?
Lastly the flaw description of PTSD would make sens if he was a soldier and suffered PTSD as a result of a war, this would mean that in order to enter a war zone again he would have to over come a big obstacle. However if he were a civilian and suffered PTSD from an event in civilian life, such as a car accident, entering a war zone isn’t that big a deal for him. What other flaw would provide him with a major obstacle to overcome before achieving his outer goal against the Nazis?
As Nir Shelter said.
And the objective goal of the Resistance was to ?do more than just ?stop war Nazi crimes (and there were plenty); the goal was to to liberate France from the Nazis altogether.
Before I review your new version, I have something to say. ?We take the time to review these loglines in order to help people, and in turn hope that they will return the favor when we post our own ideas. So, of course you don’t need to use our suggestions, but please consider that we take time out of our days to read and type up our thoughts on your logline, so appreciate it. In Nir’s review, he said that he was using your idea as an example, trying to give you good start to change it to fit your story, but I suppose you thought he was trying to force you to change you story.
Anyway, the inciting incident should have a clear connection to the rest of the plot. If there is not an inciting incident that can be clearly connected to the plot within the logline, then I would say go without one, or else it may just cause confusion.
“Alone in a foreign land, mute street performer, Lincoln Hoch, inspires the French Resistance to look at liberty with a different perspective of authentic freedom.”
First, I would say take out the name, it doesn’t add much.
Then, replace “inspires the French Resistance to look at liberty with a different perspective of authentic freedom”?with what he specifically does to do this. Establish stakes, what will happen if he doesn’t take this action? ?Clearly indicate in the logline what the character’s motivation is, which is usually what the inciting incident does, but if you choose to not use one, then give him a clear motivation in another way.
In real life, people can wander for years, decades, their whole lives with any number of objective goals ?or none at all — a plotless life.
But in reel life– movies — the main character is supposed to have an overarching objective goal. ?In other words: ?the character needs a plot. ?There may be any number of subordinate goals on the way to achieving the overarching goal, but there needs to be one overarching goal, a unity of action.
And that overarching goal unifying the action needs to be identified in the logline.
Take the justly acclaimed movie “Son of Saul” (2015), set in the Auschwitz death camp in October, 1944. The main character is a Sondercommando, a Jewish prisoner, who in exchange for being allowed to live for a few more months, herds his fellow Jews into the gas chambers. That’s the the setup, the initial situation.
And then he discovers the body of his illegitimate son in a heap of freshly gassed corpses (Inciting ?Incident). ?He resolves to bury him rather than have his body burn in the ovens. ?(Objective Goal). ? The plot is set in motion.
Numerous harrowing and horrendous life-and-death events follow and all of them are tied together –unity of action– by the prisoner’s ?objective goal, ?his desperate desire to have his son’s body buried rather than burned. ?Here’s my take on a logline:
When a Jewish forced laborer, who survives by cremating other Jews in Auschwitz, discovers the body of his son, he struggles to have him buried rather than burned.
(28 words)
The unifying action is specific, unambiguous . And the logline ?also performs another function. ?It implicitly raises a dramatic question that the movie will eventually answer. ?In the case of “Son of Saul” the dramatic question is: ?will the Sondercommando succeed in burying his son?
What dramatic question does your logline raise that the rest of the story will eventually answer?
And before any further arguments against an over arching goal are bought up, for main stream stories, the need for a unity of action driven by an over arching goal is not a Hollywood only notion that dares breach the sanctity of art by suggesting that films are a commercial endeavour? it was explained, if not defined, by Aristotle himself.
Yes, indeed. ?If there is an one iron law of drama it is that there must be unity of action. ?And the nature of that unified action is a function of the objective goal of the protagonist.