Suffering from deep psychological scars, the troubled young girl struggles to live a normal life again.
GeraldLogliner
Suffering from deep psychological scars, the troubled young girl struggles to live a normal life again.
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Hi, this isn’t really a Logline, this is more the arc of a person who overcomes their past.
What is it that sets them on this road to recovery, what goal are they seeking.
When she’s invited to a school reunion… could be a good story start, school can be terrible for some and having to relive it could be horrible.
You’d still need a goal, so maybe she plans on using the reunion to hunt the down the players of the football team to find out who attacked her.
Shear have plans to kill this person, but by confronting these people and seeing she has more strength than they ever will she decides not to kill them and instead get proper justice and show she won’t be held back by her past and will let it be a driver.
Hope that helps
Loglines are made out of clear details, not generic descriptions. In this instance “…deep psychological scars…” could mean any number of things – rape, witnessing a murder, getting beaten up, etc…
Similarly “…struggles to live a normal life…” could also mean many things, it’s important to specify a goal that best embodies a “normal life”, whatever ‘normal’ is…
Point is, through the causal connection of the specific events and actions described in your logline, her emotional problems and needs should be made clear.
I suggest you read up on logline best practice check out the ‘Formula’ tab up top.
To get you started here are a few questions to think about:
What is her inciting incident?
What is her external goal?
What is her obstacle?
Gerald:
I notice that this is your 3rd posted logline about a protagonist who is in deep psychological pain. ?So it seems to be the dramatic bone you want to chew on .
A protagonist with a troubled psyche is excellent raw material for a drama. ?And the trick to building a movie plot and a logline with that raw material is to have an inciting incident that places that troubled psyche in a specific dramatic situation that forces her to ?overcome her psychological problem in the course of struggling for a specific objective goal.
As an example take the 2010 movie “It’s Kind of a Funny Story”. ? When a?suicidal (character vulnerability) teen checks himself in for an overnight stay in a psyche ward (inciting incident) only to discover he can’t leave for 5 days (dramatic problem), he must find a way to escape (objective goal). ?The movie explores his psychological problem within the specific context of the adult ward of the hospital in which he has unwittingly become trapped. ?His ?struggle for his?objective goal (escaping) is the means by which he works out his ?problem.
This is what your logline needs to do: ?throw your troubled protagonist into a specific situation that compels her to struggle for a ?specific objective goal that she can only achieve by overcoming her psychological problem (aka: her?character arc).
So, in effect, her struggle becomes her healing process.?
And then there is ?“Ordinary People” (1980), ?an emotionally moving and psychologically insightful film ?about a protagonist suffering from “deep psychological scars”. ?(It “only” won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Script adapted from another medium, Best Actor and Best Director.) ?
In “Ordinary People” ?the accidental death of a brother in a boating accident plunges the surviving brother into a suicidal spiral of grief and guilt . ?That is the cause of his psychological scars. ? The movie opens with a PTSD flashback to the incident, the boating accident, that triggers his crisis.
In contrast, ?none of your posted loglines mention an inciting incident. ?We are given no clue as to HOW the girl got her “scars”, WHY she is suffering. ?We don’t ?know what makes her suffering different from anyone else’s suffering in any other film about psychological scars.
What is the specific event that causes her “psychological scars”?
As a result of those scars what MUST she do about it? ?What becomes her specific objective goal, her specific plan to heal those scars?
And here’s a big one: ?what’s at stake if she fails? (In “Ordinary People” the stakes are the protagonist’s very life — he’ll try to commit suicide again.)
fwiw?