Hi everyone--because I'm a film student, I always try to apply what I've learned from film studies to my work in comics as well. A simple but important thing that people often overlook when preparing/pitching a story is creating a log line--a one sentence descriptor of your comic/film/story that draws interest and gives your intended an audience a pretty solid idea of what the story is going to be about.
Some loglines of well known movies:
"The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son." - (The Godfather)
"Camp counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant while trying to reopen a summer camp that was the site of a child’s drowning." (Friday the 13th)
"With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner." (Django Unchained)
"Two monsters make a living out of scaring children until the cutest kid ever finds her way into their world (and their hearts.)" (Monsters. Inc)
"A food-loving rat who dreams of cooking learns how to control an awkward amateur chef's movements via hair strands--the chef is mad!" (Ratatouille)
"During a preview tour, a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaur exhibits to run amok." (Jurassic Park)
As you can see, it's pretty easy to sum up the content of these movies without even spoiling anything, but still giving enough information to draw the audience, in just one sentence. A few things I'd like to point out in these loglines is that there are different means of structuring them and different things that make them successful.
Irony
In almost every log line I listed above, there is a sense of irony to the pitch that works well as a draw. "Two monsters who scare kids for a living meet and love a kid!?!" How ironic!
"Camp counselors, the people responsible for watching kids at camp, are being killed at the site where a kid died at camp!?" How ironic!
You get the idea. Irony is almost crucial to a good logline/pitch because it implies complexity and also implies a part of the conflict, if not the entire conflict. In the case of Ratatouille, the logline ends with "the chef is mad"--here's a conflict! Perhaps not the MAIN conflict, but at least a character driven arc that will likely be resolved by the end of the story. Just how will the chef stop being angry and learn to love and cooperate with the rat? Watch the movie and find out! ![:wink: wink](/images/emoji/emoji_one/wink.png)
Plot-Focus vs Character-Focus vs World-Focus
A story's logline structure can change a lot based on what the primary draw or focus of the story is going to be about.
In the examples I listed above, Ratatouille, Django and The Godfather would be examples of Character-Focused loglines. The reason for this is because the logline goes into a lot of details about the primary characters, including the irony of their relationships. In Ratatouille, they describe the rat as "food-loving with a dream" and the chef as "awkward and amateur", setting the stage for their interactions. In Django, the character descriptions/context I think are more relevant to the nature of the plot, re: why would a German bounty hunter want to work with a freed slave during this time period? There's risks involved all around--they also use the word brutal to describe the antagonist (the plantation owner who kidnapped his wife) to further paint a picture of the characters we're dealing with. In the Godfather, it's much simpler--they set up the Godfather character as a very powerful man with their usage of words like "patriarch" and "dynasty" and then in turn, use the word "reluctant" to describe the son. Immediately, this tells us there is going to be some interpersonal drama between these characters and likely any other character who crosses their path. Now that I think about it, Monsters' Inc would probably also be character-driven if only because the logline focuses on the relationship of the monsters vs. the kid changing the dynamic of the story, but I would also argue it could be world-focused due to the setup it provides...
Friday the 13th from above is absolutely an example of a Plot-Focused logline, because we get little to no information about any of the characters--who or what kind of person is the protagonist? How about the antagonist? We get NO information on this whatsoever--all we know is that camp counselors are being murdered in the ironic location of a camp where a kid drowned. When you look at this logline, you start to fantasize about what kind of scary things could be happening, what kind of horrors the camp counselors have to run away from--you don't think or care so much about the aspirations or character arcs of the leads or antagonist characters. This story is predominantly about the event of the murders and less so about the characters themselves.
Jurassic Park is an example of a World-Focused logline---the emphasis is placed so heavily on the location and nature of the location to the point where we absolutely no information about characters at all. We obviously get information about the plot, re: the dinosaurs are running amok, what are we gonna do? But are the dinosaurs going to kill people? Is it going to be a comedy where we have to wrangle up the dinosaurs cowboy style? Do the dinosaurs teach us how bad it is to lock up animals and we learn to love? Who knows--but we did get quite the vivid idea of the world and circumstances from this logline which is more than enough to draw us in to be curious about how the sequential events of the movie will unfold.
TL;DR WHY ARE THEY IMPORTANT ALREADY!!!
Loglines are just as important for comic artists as they are film makers because it's the line you should be using when you pitch your concept to other people. It should be the line you're using in the description boxes here on Tapastic, your personal site and other hosting websites. It's the line you should be telling people when you first introduce them to your comics. People do not want to sit and read two paragraphs of all of the complexities of your plot to figure out if they like it or not--if you have short, sweet, catchy logline, people will be much more inclined to check it out. The complexities and little details of your story--those can come up in your pages--that's what they're there for, right? Keep your descriptions short, sweet and true to the nature of the story and it will be much easier to convince people that reading your story is a good use of their time.
Organizationally, I think loglines are good too because it can help you as a storyteller because you can use it as your "skeleton structure." If you can figure out what kind of story you want to tell by dwindling it down to a logline, you can use it as a reference point whenever you feel lost in the direction you're heading with your comic. With your logline, you can determine whether your story is character-centric, world-centric or plot-centric and adjust your writing to fit the bill. You can see what the major draws of the story are, whatever the irony in your story is, and play it up, refer back to it and make sure it's resolved by the time you wrap things up.
With all that being said, my logline for my comic is:
"The apathetic, reluctant granddaughter of a world famous vampire hunter teams up with a flamboyant, egocentric vampire glam rocker to hunt down a vampire serial killer."
Truth be told, I don't like my logline so much! LOL I hate that I use the word vampire so much in it, but it's hard to get around because it's a descriptor for the protagonist, the support character and the antagonist. I want to tinker with it some more so that it sounds a bit less repetitive, but I'm not sure how to do so hehe--any suggestions would be appreciated!
Now that I've said my piece on it, what's YOUR comic's logline?
References for further reading:
https://www.filmsourcing.com/how-to-write-blockbuster-logline/
http://www.indiewire.com/2014/01/how-to-write-the-perfect-logline-and-why-its-as-important-as-your-screenplay-31710/
http://logline.it/