LPS - Loglines and Plot Structure (Overview)

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Loglines and Plot Structure

Introduction

How many of the following movies do you recognize?

    • Two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.
    • A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.
    • A wheelchair-bound photographer spies on his neighbors from his apartment window and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.
    • A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.
    • When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community, it’s up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.
    • An insurance salesman discovers his whole life is actually a reality TV show.
    • A weatherman finds himself inexplicably living the same day over and over again.
    • After discovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the lunar surface, mankind sets off on a quest to find its origins with help from intelligent supercomputer HAL 9000.
    • An angel is sent from Heaven to help a desperately frustrated businessman by showing him what life would have been like if he had never existed.
    • The spirits of a deceased couple are harassed by an unbearable family that has moved into their home and hire a malicious spirit to drive them out.
    • A man must struggle to travel home for Thanksgiving with an obnoxious slob of a shower curtain ring salesman as his only companion.
    • A troubled child summons the courage to help a friendly alien escape Earth and return to his home world.

All of these short descriptions are loglines for iconic movies. In this module, we will explore how to create effective loglines and how to arrange the create and arrange all of the events that need to occur to transform these short descriptions into fully mapped out plots.

Key Terms

Review the following key terms for the module:

  1. Loglines - Concise summary of the story for a screenplay
  2. Protagonist - The hero of the story
  3. Goal – The driving purpose of the script
  4. Antagonist/Antagonistic Force – The person or force which the hero battles against
  5. Catalyst – The event that speeds up the action or forces the protagonist to act
  6. Beat Cards - small cards that divide up the key moments of a screenplay

Module Lessons Preview

In this module, we will study the following topics:

Loglines: One great sentence can pitch your project, hook a reader, and open the right door. A logline is the one-line, concise summary of the story for a screenplay. In this microlesson, we will explore how to write an effective logline.

Screenplay Plot Structure: How do we transform a one sentence, pithy summary into all the events that need to occur into a fully mapped out plot? In this microlesson, we will explore how to do craft an effective Screenplay Plot Structure.

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