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When a NY cop visits his estranged wife at her LA office building, he stumbles into a terrorist heist and must rescue the employee hostages.
Pretty good, does the job.As usual, a trade off has to be made in information for the sake of brevity. ?Here's my trade off:When his estranged wife becomes a hostage in multi-million dollar heist, a wise guy cop must foil ruthless robbers and rescue the hostages. (23 words)That's what I see as the hRead more
Pretty good, does the job.
As usual, a trade off has to be made in information for the sake of brevity. ?Here’s my trade off:
When his estranged wife becomes a hostage in multi-million dollar heist, a wise guy cop must foil ruthless robbers and rescue the hostages.
(23 words)
That’s what I see as the hook. ?As far as bait:
Estranged: ?He’s got to rescue her in spite of conflicted feelings; this implies the subjective, relationship problem that needs to be rectified in the course of achieving the objective goal.
Multi-million dollar: ?to underscore the monetary stakes. ?It’s not a nickle-and-dime job.
Wise guy: A defining characteristic but not a character flaw. ?He’s in sufficient jeopardy without the need to be handicapped by a character flaw. ?His character flaw is in relation to his relationship with his wife — not his performance as a cop.
Ruthless:?To underscore what kind of villains he’s fighting, the amplitude of his jeopardy and that of the stake characters, his wife ?and the other hostages.
Foil and rescue: ?One dramatic problem with 2 stakes: ?money and lives.
fwiw
See lessWhen an emotionally detached woman returns home after a decade of uncontrollable jumps into parallel universes, she must reconnect with her estranged father to create a cure before vanishing once again.
>>She has to find a place to put the heart.What about a person? Someone to bond with, to anchor her heart in ?one location?Yeah, I know she's emotionally detached. ?But could that be a problem with the logline as well as the character? ?There's the possibility for arcing to emotional attachmenRead more
What about a person? Someone to bond with, to anchor her heart in ?one location?
Yeah, I know she’s emotionally detached. ?But could that be a problem with the logline as well as the character? ?There’s the possibility for arcing to emotional attachment ?– but no hint of an arc to another person. ?Just a location?
There’s no obvious antagonist. ?I have no problem with that. ?The predicament (flip-flopping in time-space) is good enough for the cause and aggravation of the dramatic problem.
But it seems to me, the logline would benefit by inclusion of another ?character with whom the protagonist is in an emotional relationship. Or wants to be or needs to be.
The obvious go-to relationship character would be a “love interest”.
Or maybe?a stakes character (like a child), some one who needs her.
Or an incentive character whom she desperately needs (subjectively) to be united with.
“Inception” comes to mind. ?Cobb’s undertakes the inception job to be re-united with his children. ?That’s the emotional? draw and payoff for him. ?Not just getting back to his home ?in the U.S. — but the ?humans in that home, his kids.
My own gut feeling is that getting emotionally detached to a place just isn’t compelling enough. ?Rather, the best emotional attachments in drama are to people, not places.
fwiw
See lessA detective’s ex-wife asks him to find their missing son, he discovers that a mysterious old woman abducted him, and learns dark secrets about his wife and his own past, that forces him to take action.
In order to clarify the issues, I vetted your logline through my standard template of logline questions. ?Here, fwiw, is my readout: Required logline elements are in bold. Useful logline elements are in italics.What is the hook??In my schema of logline elements, this one is the most important. ?AllRead more
In order to clarify the issues, I vetted your logline through my standard template of logline questions. ?Here, fwiw, is my readout:
Required logline elements are in bold.
Useful logline elements are in italics.
In my schema of logline elements, this one is the most important. ?All the other elements hang on the hook. And the purpose of the other elements is to make the hook irresistible to a logline reader, to make want to bite, to read the script.
Your hook seems to be a “mystical secret”.? But that’s vague, too vague. It needs to be more specific.
I don’t mean it has to be totally spelled out in a logline because there’s not enough space and because a logline shouldn’t contain spoilers.? But it needs to be specific enough to be compelling hook guaranteed to grab reader and viewer attention. ?Right now, it’s a bare hook in want of a sufficient supply of enticing bait.
And the enticing bait should come from the other required elements. Like:
Well, cutting through all the psychobabble about the character arc, it comes down to this: the purpose of character flaw is to make it more difficult for the protagonist to succeed. Which creates dramatic tension. ?Which is prime bait for the hook.
Is there a clear cause-and-effect link between the inciting incident and the objective goal?
Obviously, yes. ?
I suggest reworking the logline (which may entail reworking the plot) to add the missing bait to your hook and spice up entire “bait package”.
Fwiw, my 2.5 cents worth. Hope it helps.