Man and Machine
PoromaaPenpusher
When a colonisation crew of four escaping a threatened earth, awakens by ship failure, a useless artist must save the mission and mankind from a captain, incorrectly believing one of them isn?t human.
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I think you’ve got a great start, just keep working at it and you’ll get it. My suggestion would be to be careful not to confuse your backstory with your story. I’m guilty of this a lot as well. Just keep in mind the story is about your main character, not the world in which they exist.
Without getting too heavily into screenplay structure, I agree with bondthewriter on this one. Don’t worry about the rest of the setup – just make sure the inciting incident for your CORE narrative is explained. It does sound like this story begins because they are woken from hypersleep.
I’ve found this logline really hard to write off the top of my head – but I will say that I think you need to keep mention of what it is that the artist is protecting; specifically, the survival of the human race.
Thanks for your feedback.
I thought that the 10 first pages should explain how the thinking machine gets created, and how it enlighten the humans – giving sight to the blind and ears to the deaf, but at the cost of its persistence. Its simply unstoppable. A secret project to preserve the human race is created with a mission to settle on a new planet etc…
Thats the setup.
But I guess one can leave out the setup from the logline? I tried to have some of it there (with “threatened earth”). Infested earth is probably better but then I want to make clear its not a virus or a plague but rather an uncontrollable evolution (like the industrial revolution).
My question would be what happens during the first part (10 pages if you’re writing feature length) of the story? When does this ‘failure’ occur? It sounds like the ship failure would be your inciting incident, but if that’s the case.. what happens before that? The people are sleeping on the ship, right? If thats the case what is your setup?
Anyways.. here is my take..
“After a spaceship malfunction awakens the crew, while fleeing an infested Earth, a dysfunctional artist struggles against a paranoid captain for control of the mission.”
IF the malfunction and the crew waking up happens right at the beginning then it’s not your inciting incident… so you could get rid of it and replace it with the actual incident.
Good, luck. Story sounds cool.
And since the logline is a tool to find the real story I will consider making it simpler. As you say the ship-failure is not really important, but its just an excuse to get them together in the middle of nowhere.
Thanks for the input! Sometimes when you write an outline of a plot its hard to see what’s important and what’s not.
The reason for this ship is actually to save the human race from hybridisation by the machines. Therefore an excerpt of different people have been chosen to represent humanity. The small crew contains of a captain, a doctor, an engineer and an artist. No one likes the artist, since he can’t really do anything smart like the others, but the artist is the protagonist.
When man has discovered artificial intelligence it can’t be stopped. What first looks like something great (a thinking machine) turns out to be devastating to humanity as is. The thinking machine is spreading like a virus into every single computer chip ever created because it doesn?t want to get turned off (this is a story by it self). With nano technology it then spreads into the human brain and the hybrids are created. The hybrids are like humans, but much smarter (wifi connected etc). This becomes a new race (humans 2.0).
Okay, so this ship is escaping this to ensure the preservation of the human. Thus, we don’t want any hybrids on-board.
This story would start about here with the ship failure. However it turns out (in the end) that the ship was in fact awakened by a message from earth warning them about a hybrid on board. The captain deleted the message to ensure the real hybrid would not know, but of course the real hybrid is not whom we think it is (We suspect the captain who suspects the doctor). The real hybrid is (probably too obvious) the artist. He will kill the captain to save the doctor (a human). He will also show that the hybrid is a worthy representation of humanity since it is simply a human with more abilities (this is what my story is really about).
You’ve definitely given us the information we need but I do think it could be trimmed:
Whilst escaping a threatened Earth an inept artist must protect the small crew when the Captain begins to suspect one of them isn’t human.
This is a bit of a rushed attempt but I still think it gives us the same detail in less of a sentence. Don’t think you need mission and mankind as it doesn’t sound like they’re on a mission simply escaping Earth. Also why is it an artist? I don’t think you need the ship failure in their either as they are already stranded in space so this could just be a turn within the bigger story.
Hope this helps.