How to write a logline producers won't pass on | Hacker News Reader

How to write a logline producers won't pass on

studiobinder.com

68 pointslovestaco29 comments

I like articles like this even though I'll never write a screenplay because it's fun to think of ways to apply it to ordinary persuasive writing. That said: if the craft of screenplay writing interests you, and if you haven't already, immediately subscribe to the Scriptnotes podcast, which is Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, Last of Us) and John August (Go, Big Fish), for like 600 episodes.

Ah Go is one of those movies that got lost in the field in 1999; it would have been the top film of the spring in many other years, but opening 1 week after The Matrix leaves it with few people my age (I was a senior in HS when it came out) knowing about it.

I loved Go when I was in high school. It’s actually not very good if you’ve seen Pulp Fiction. I mean to be fair The Matrix isn’t good either. But hey it was a different time. We were drunk on Limp Bizkit.

> We were drunk on Limp Bizkit.

Man that just triggered some latent CPTSD

Ah! I actually saw go and matrix on the same day as we arrived to the cinema too late for the earlier matrix show! I forgot everything but I remember liking it a lot.

Emphatically seconded. They also have great guests, like Scott Frank (recently discussed on HN from a New Yorker article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812736). I started listening in 2020 and between workouts and long drives have made it through every single episode.

OP's proposed logline for Star Wars would have been a total fail in the era when the logline was needed, namely before the film was made or known.

>Luke Skywalker, a spirited farm boy, joins rebel forces to save Princess Leia from the evil Darth Vader, and the galaxy from the Empire’s Death Star.

This is probably not an article you want to learn logline writing from.

It seems that this is being used as an example of a lackluster logline coming from a generator, though it's not completely clear.

----- TRY USING A LOGLINE GENERATOR Maybe you’re stuck for ideas, either way, a generator is a cool way to brainstorm, but not end up with a final product. A logline generator can give direction for a character you want to write about, but any generator or formula will leave you with something lackluster.

Star Wars: A New Hope Luke Skywalker, a spirited farm boy, joins rebel forces to save Princess Leia from the evil Darth Vader, and the galaxy from the Empire’s Death Star.

Another hint that it's a deliberately lackluster example is that it violates a rule given in the article: don't use character names.

I don't know what you two read, but the current version is perfectly clear.

> a generator is a cool way to brainstorm, but not end up with a final product... any generator or formula will leave you with something lackluster

There’s a pretty entertaining genre of the worst possible loglines. E.g.: “Farm boy joins terrorists, bombs father’s workplace.” “Businessmen nap on airplane.”

Since Jun of 2023 (date I checked on archive.org) at least, this has read

> A logline generator can give direction for a character you want to write about, but any generator or formula will leave you with something lackluster.

> Luke Skywalker, a spirited farm boy, joins rebel forces to save Princess Leia from the evil Darth Vader, and the galaxy from the Empire’s Death Star.

That's obviously intended as being lackluster. So I don't get how anyone could possibly be confused by this. It's quite plain English.

Studio Binder is my go-to example when talking about well-run inbound content marketing.

They produce long articles that rank well in search for a wide variety of popular keywords related to movies and TV. But the articles are actually helpful and informative—so much so that they also drive organic social traffic (example: this post on HN). And each article features a few conversion widgets, but not so many where it’s hard to read the content.

I know nothing about the ROI and other back-end data for this program. It must be working for them, though, because it’s been going for a while.

> Using tv logline example, Silicon Valley, we'd see that the logline is "A shy silicon valley engineer tries to build his own company." While the tagline is "He's got called company."

"He's got called company"? What does that mean? Am I missing a play on words here or is this just gibberish?

Maybe some sort of wordplay on “cold company” and something else? Had the same question, but couldn’t figure it out.

Well, Google only seems to find that site and a couple of clones for the phrase "He's got called company". IMDB doesn't list it either: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/taglines/ (granted it's not the definitive source, and could just be missing it)

Does kind feel like a translation of

> They've got company

It's some weird spam, it hung around the 1st 2nd page boundary yesterday too, in a completely separate submission

Silicon Valley taglines according to IMDb:

- Where everyone wants to be an icon

- See genius in a whole new light

- Helping humanity thrive. Changing the way things change.

- They've got company.

Slightly tangential, but does anyone have a non-standard, 2023-24 relevant advice for novel queries?

It depends greatly on the genre, but I do have some experience in querying. How does one DM these days on HN?

Very cool. I wonder how much of this approach is reusable in marketing.

This is basically the same as writing the landing page headline. Concisely explain what your product is, differentiating it from the competition. Make it interesting.

Is it just me or is there some application here to writing user stories?

A fumbling user clicks a submit button twice and it unleashes chaos in the web engine.

But in all seriousness—sometimes a lack of detail can be freeing while folks figure it out.

What is this trash site?? I don't even know where to start reading??

Hah. I read 'logline' in the context of logging information by a running process, and thought the post was about log lines that a logging infrastructure would not pass on for some reason.

Been computering too much :)

I was excited to read about filtering within logging pipelines, however the article left me bitterly dissapointed.

Even in a logging pipeline, you want to know who the protagonist is.

A NullPointerException? I’m going to need a stacktrace to understand the backstory here.

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