Itchy Feet and Loglines

I am going through a brief and disconcerting period where I can do nothing on Little Things and have to wait on others to do some work on the picture. Arun Parmar, my sound engineer mate is currently playing with the audio. Cleaning up the dialogue, getting rid of as much background noise as possible, matching the levels from shot to shot, that sort of thing. I've also spoken to Kevin Brew of I Phoenix fame who now has a copy of the rough cut and is working on the score for the film.


Until I have these elements back I'm pretty much at a loose end film-wise. This has been seen by some as an ideal window of opportunity for me to do such chores as tiling the porch. Not nearly as much fun as film making but does give some sense of achievement. 


As I can't do anything with Little Things itself I have taken to do some peripheral bits and pieces that I've been meaning to do for a long time. The first of which is to write a logline for the film.


For those of you who don't know what a logline is, it's a brief statement that outlines what a film is about. It is not the same thing as a tagline. A tagline is what they put under the title on the poster; "In space no one can hear you complain about Fincher's sequel" and the like. A logline is something different. It outlines your plot, main characters, and genre in about 3 sentences, 3 short sentences. It is used when you are trying to pitch your film to people who may do things like, pay for it to be made, accept it into festivals, market it, sell it, buy it, in short get it seen by other people. You know Robert Altman's film "The Player"? You know the "25 words or less" synopsis that Tim Robbins keeps asking for? That's a logline.


I know that the writers among you will be wondering why the hell I haven't done the logline before now. Two reasons. Number 1, because I'm making Little Things myself I haven't had the need to pitch it to anyone else. Number 2, because it's really fucking hard! You've read my stuff. You may not have seen any scripts of mine but you've gotten at least this far down the page of my blog. Do you honestly think that brevity is a strength of mine? It took me weeks to condense Little Things down from 16 pages to 9, now I need to trim it down to a couple of dozen words. Tiling might be easier.


There are hordes of people ready to tell you what good loglines should consist. Many of them, I might add, completely contradict each other. There are some common threads though. And as per usual I've followed the same approach that Grampa Simpson followed to history "I pieced it together , mostly from sugar packets". So based on this scientific approach, I worked under the assumption that a logline should contain references to: protagonist, the protagonist's goal, other significant characters, and the genre. It should do this hopefully peaking the interest of whoever reads it and without giving away the ending. After a couple of dozen rewrites while my wife watched X-Factor and my ears bled, I came up with this


"A world-weary young guy tries to prove that his enigmatic friend does not have a magical ability to change people’s destinies, by meeting up with a girl whose fate has supposedly been altered."

So tell me what you think. If you've written loglines before, tell me how I could do this better? If you know the story and have been involved, does it do what I want it to do? If you don't fall into either category, does it make you want to watch the film?


Your comments would be appreciated...