Last week in our ongoing discussion of loglines, we looked at how to use conflict. This time, we’re going to look at the more subtle art of including irony in a logline.

Irony is a very valuable commodity in a logline, especially if your story is a comedy. It makes your audience settle back into their seats thinking, “This is gonna be good!” Because everybody loves irony. It makes us think about how this story is going to show two sides of the same coin.

Audiences love stories that show them two (or more!) sides of a coin. (Though I suppose if it had more than two sides, it wouldn’t be a coin, would it?) We enjoy deep movies and books that explore all the little nooks and crannies of a theme.

A theme, by the way, is the main idea that your story is exploring. The stories we consider classics often have characters that each live out a different facet of the theme, giving the audience a vast experience with an idea and allowing them to see where following that idea would lead.

As far as comedy goes, irony is great, because irony is very funny when done right. The key is to use irony to hint at the comedy and let the audience run wild thinking about how funny the premise can be.

So how’s this work in practice? Let’s grab some Hollywood films and check it out.

[Continue reading How Ironic That We Don’t Use Irony …]

Categories: Blog | Tags: how to write a logline, irony Add Comment »

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is! Our short film A House for Marge is finally online for viewing! The screenplay was written by Aubrey Hansen and the music was composed by Rick Holets. Enjoy!

By the way, Rick Holets has released the score as a free download on his web site. If you enjoyed the film, please check it out!

Categories: Blog, Movies, Video | Tags: A House for Marge, short film 7 Comments »

Throughout this series on writing loglines, I’ve danced around the idea that a good logline contains conflict and irony. I’ve even given you plenty of examples that contain one or both. But I haven’t talked specifically about how each works. It’s time now to concentrate on bringing those two elements to your logline party. We’ll cover conflict in this post, and next time we’ll look at how to use irony.

Conflict is the fundamental element of story. But it’s also an element that is often misunderstood or outright ignored, especially by beginning storytellers. So let’s go back to the basics for a minute. [Continue reading Stop Avoiding Conflict …]

Categories: Blog | Tags: conflict, how to write a logline 2 Comments »

It’s time once again to explore the craft of writing a great logline. This week, we’re going to look at what a good adjective does to a logline.

Let’s take some rather bland Hollywood movie loglines and see what we can do with adjectives to improve them. We’ll do a two films from previous articles, and we’ll also do a new one so you can see the process a little better.

Jurassic Park: A scientist must protect two children when a dinosaur park goes haywire and the monsters go on rampage.

Pirates of the Caribbean – Curse of the Black Pearl: When the governor’s daughter is kidnapped by a band of pirates, her lover must join forces with a pirate captain to save her before she is sacrificed to lift a curse.

How to Train Your Dragon: Against the traditions of his Viking tribe, a boy befriends a dragon and discovers secrets about the creatures that will change his tribe’s way of life forever.

[Continue reading Tickle Me with Your Adjective Feather …]

Categories: Blog | Tags: adjectives, descriptors, how to write a logline 3 Comments »

Now that we’ve spent four posts getting our loglines hashed out, I want to share a tip that I think can punch up a good logline and make it great.

It’s the simple use of the word must or forced. How’s that work? Let’s look at some loglines.

In my previous post, I gave a few loglines for existing movies that I had written as examples. The one I wrote for Facing the Giants could use some extra oomph, so we’ll take a closer look at it a bit later. First, I want to come back to the best example from last time, which was the logline for Jurassic Park. Let’s write that logline two ways. [Continue reading It’s a Must to be Forced …]

Categories: Blog | Tags: forced, how to write a logline, must, summaries, word choice 2 Comments »