The goal is to sell the idea of the script, rather than the story itself, and the most effective way to do this is with a strong logline. That’s okay though because you don’t need to give away the entire story – in fact you shouldn’t. And unfortunately when dealing with anyone that can really do something for your film, all you might have is a sentence or two worth of time to get your idea across. After all, it simply isn’t possible to convey every last detail of a 110 page script in a sentence or two. If you’ve ever tried to explain your entire feature film to someone in one sentence, you’ve surely found that it can be quite challenging. It’s important to note that while it’s critical to have a good logline so that you can concisely explain your film on paper, it works just as well verbally. This is the log line for Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jaws’:Ī land lubber sheriff tries to kill a giant shark to protect his family and seaside resort town.

While loglines today are no longer printed on the screenplays themselves, they effectively serve the exact same purpose – to efficiently represent the story and get the potential reader interested. Loglines were used in the early days of Hollywood so producers could read a short explanation of a script (most often printed on the spine of the screenplay), allowing them to skip over disinteresting screenplays without even pulling them out from the shelf. It’s the one or two sentence summary of your film that not only conveys your premise, but also gives the reader emotional insight into the story as a whole. The logline is truly an art form of its own.

A logline example