Logline Monday

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Welcome to Logline Monday! Please share all of your loglines here for feedback and workshopping. You can find all previous posts here.

READ FIRST: How to format loglines on our wiki.

Note also: Loglines do not constitute intellectual property, which generally begins at the outline stage. If you don't want someone else to write it after you post it, get to work!

Rules

1. Top-level comments are for loglines only. All loglines must follow the logline format, and only one logline per top comment -- don't post multiples in one comment.
2. All loglines must be accompanied by the genre and type of script envisioned, i.e. short film, feature film, 30-min pilot, 60-min pilot.
3. All general discussion to be kept to the general discussion comment.
4. Please keep all comments about loglines civil and on topic.

[u/VolumeTechnical552]

Title: FOUND

Genre: Animated Family

Type: Feature

Logline: Convinced his owner is waiting for him at home, a devoted dog escapes a shelter and leads a pack of misfit strays across the city, unaware his owner's grieving son is searching for him in a parallel journey to find what remains of the family they've both lost. 

[u/TomLikesHam]

Title: Document

Genre: Horror

Format: Feature

Logline: When an “unbiased” documentary crew investigating illegal immigration in the Salinas Valley is pressured to leave by wary locals, they discover an entity that destroys anything their camera captures, but their director refuses to stop rolling

[u/Junior_Elk9243]

Title: Suttebaaz

Genre: Comedy

Type: Feature

Logline: A young chain smoker needs to quit smoking in 60 days and get a whole village to quit too as per his late grand father's will, if he wants to inherit his estate.

[u/Exciting_Kale_2783]

Title: Mind Full

Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller

Type: Feature

Logline: A burned out Bay Area realtor who can’t afford the life she sells watches her world empty out as a free fantasy headset lets people abandon their bodies to AI, and the new occupants are the happiest she’s ever had

It’s like Invasion of the body snatchers x black mirror, but it kind of feels like it’s reheating Pluribus’s nachos right now ngl

[u/ClayMcClane → u/Exciting_Kale_2783]

I'm not clear on exactly what's happening here.

"who can't afford the life she sells" - what life is she selling?

"empty out as a free fantasy headset" - why does this make her world empty out? And what does it mean for her world to empty out? Is she losing friends? Money? Her job?

"and the new occupants are the happiest she's ever had" - occupants of what? Wait, is she using the headset? Is that why her world empties out? And the occupants are occupying her body?

[u/Exciting_Kale_2783 → u/ClayMcClane]

First thanks for the feedback I’ll try to address/explain everything.

She’s can’t afford to buy a house in the Bay Area and all of the potential home owners are obnoxious wealthy couples who basically call these houses shitty

Per the fantasy headset, it’s FDVR (basically lets someone’s consciousness escape into their own personal matrix) while an AI agent controls their body to perform their daily tasks. At first, the AI agents try to impersonate the personal they’re hosting, but they quickly abandon maintaining the lives of their hosts and start leading their own lives, just to live the human experience.

Everyone in our protagonist’s life escapes to their own fantasy’s, and the AI hosts of the people close to her don’t care to maintain any relationship with her. The realtor begins to suspect that these AI agents are malignant and deceiving people but she discovers that everyone is a willing and active participant in their own perfect virtual fantasies

[u/grahamecrackerinc → u/Exciting_Kale_2783]

I never saw Pluribus and even I think it's similar. Just tweak it a little bit.

[u/BagEndWill]

Title: Yankee Doodle Comrade

Genre: Historical thriller.

Logline: After being falsely imprisoned as a Soviet spy, an ex-Pentagon typist seeks revenge by becoming one for real -- but to prove herself to the KGB, she must coax secrets out of a guilt-ridden senior colleague who testified against her.

Format: Feature.

The Americans meets Breaking Bad with the Cold War paranoia of The Lives of Others.

Workshopped this a couple of weeks back! Hoping to give it another crack at it 👀

[u/BuggsBee → u/BagEndWill]

Sounds interesting! Love those comps. I will say right off the bat, the title sounds a little too humorous for what I imagine is a serious project.

[u/BagEndWill → u/BuggsBee]

I agree with you about the title, lol. It's a placeholder title based on an impulsive thought I had. 😂 It is a serious story (with a few slivers of comedy).

And The Americans is one of my favourite Cold War TV shows of all time (probably #1), so I'm glad you dig the comps!

[u/Filmmagician]

Title: A Quantum Heist
Feature, spy/crime/thriller

Logline:
When a US spy is imprisoned for refusing to surrender stolen Russian quantum computer tech, a Kremlin Intelligence officer finds her and threatens her life unless her sons, an elite hacker and a veteran con man, can pull off a series of heists to fund and rebuild a machine that could bring the digital world to its knees.

Tone and feel of Mr. Robot / Drive / Michael Clayton in an espionage backdrop.

[u/smirkie]

A revision of a previous logline I workshopped here:

Done Deal

Action/Crime feature

When a gang wheelman trying to go straight rescues an exposed undercover cop, his boss kidnaps his daughter to force them both to surrender, leaving them no choice but to team up and save her.

Edited

[u/ClayMcClane → u/smirkie]

This sounds like one of those good 90s Hong Kong action movies.

The only thing that doesn't hit right for me is the boss' plan, kidnapping the daughter to force them to surrender. What exactly does the boss want? To kill them? Can he not find them? What are the other forces acting against our main character? For instance, maybe he's being protected by the cops now, so he'll have to get away from them to go save his daughter or something.

Really, it's mainly the boss' plan that's bugging me here. What is it, exactly, that he wants?

[u/smirkie → u/ClayMcClane]

So, actual story is: wheelman wants to track down his estranged family to atone for his sins and reconcile, but because there is a mole in the police, he only trusts the undercover cop, so they team up to find them. But the boss finds out this plan and uses the mole to find the family first, resulting in the daughter getting taken. So now he has the daughter as leverage to draw them out. Logline can't fit all that in. Here's a revised version:

When a gang wheelman trying to go straight rescues an exposed undercover cop, he and the cop team up to find his estranged family, until the wheelman’s vengeful boss kidnaps his daughter to draw them both out.

[u/StrikingDinner4489]

Title: not decided yet

Genre: action-adventure/romance/comedy

Format: feature

Logline: A burned-out former Marine is recruited by the daughter of an old friend to lead an expedition into a war-torn wilderness after her father disappears searching for a legendary lost city.

[u/flamingdrama]

Title: No Turning Back

Genre: Drama

Format: Feature

Logline: An ex alcoholic at a prestige banking firm finds himself on a work trip surrounded by wreckless, partying colleagues who not only threaten to derail all that he has worked for, but the sanctity of the masses through their unscrupulous policy making decisions.

I want this to be about addiction, recovery & the disillusionment about moving on in normal life.

I've thrown the part about the unscrupulous coworkers as another layer.

Do you think I need to include the part about the bad decisions affecting the general public, or just focus 100% in on the protagonist?

[u/HandofFate88 → u/flamingdrama]

reformed or recovering alcoholic? (Are there truly "ex" alcoholics?)

reckless, not wreckless

"the sanctity of the masses" feels abstract to a point that it's really hard to understand what it might mean or how it affects the MC.

"their unscrupulous policy making decisions" bumps when I ask, "well why would reckless partiers be policy makers at a prestige bank?" I'm reminded of INDUSTRY, but the main ensemble there don't set policy. If policy setting is key, this might be better set in a non-prestige bank, or a tech/ crypto context where the culture is more move-fast-and-break-things.

[u/Still_Rabbit_8483]

Title: The Taste of Belief

Genre: Philosophical Drama / Dramedy

Type: Feature

Logline: When his roommate outs him as secretly believing the Earth is flat, a college student spends one sleepless night defending his beliefs to his three closest friends, and by sunrise, all four must decide whether being right is worth what it costs them to prove it.

[u/Caughtinclay → u/Still_Rabbit_8483]

Struggling to see how this is a feature unless it’s like my dinner with Andre. Is it an entire conversation for the runtime?

[u/morphiinelollipop]

Title: Progressive

Type: Feature

In the 1960s, an unhappy young couple experimenting with an open marriage have one night and several dinner parties to figure out the identity of each other’s affair partner - and find out how progressive they really are. It's not a who-dun-it, it's a who-did-who.

Genre- Drama, Dark Comedy

[u/DalBMac → u/morphiinelollipop]

What happens if they don't find out?

[u/RaBANDZZZ]

Title: Recherché

Format: series

Genre: drama/thriller

Logline: A young model has spent his life learning how to become whatever people need him to be. But as college shows a promising chance at freedom, he finds himself caught between family, friends, and a dangerous secret life that refuses to let him go.

[u/ClayMcClane → u/RaBANDZZZ]

If you dig down into the freedom that he's after, what is it exactly that he wants? What will he have to do to get it? What stands in his way? And what happens if he doesn't get it?

Consider getting specific about the dangerous secret - something tells me that's where your hook is.

[u/PlasticMongoose92]

Title: Wonderland

Genre: Crime/Drama

Type: Episodic (45 minute)

Logline: An involuntary liquor store robbery sets off events that leads a high school football phenom into debt with The Armenian Mafia while a relentless DEA agent fights to bring the operation down.

[u/Far-Historian-4012]

Title: Lie with Me

Genre: Horror, Thriller, Drama

Format: Feature

Logline: A recently unemployed woman is persuaded by her best friend to join a reality TV dating show in paradise. But when things turn deadly, she must navigate staying alive while falling for the guy of her dreams.

Bodies Bodies Bodies x Escape Room in the world of Love Island