How to write a logline
A logline is a single sentence that tells someone what your film is about and makes them want to see it. It is not a tagline (the catchy line on a poster) and not a synopsis (the plot, start to finish). It names a character, a goal, what stands in the way and what happens if they fail. Producers, festival programmers and competition readers often decide from the logline alone whether to read the script.
Writing one early also helps you. If you can't say in one sentence who your film is about and what they want, the script will usually wander too. Many writers draft the logline before the first page and come back to it whenever the story drifts.
The five parts
- Protagonist. Not a name: a description that hints at a flaw or a contradiction. "A burned-out war photographer" says more than "Sarah".
- Inciting incident. The event that knocks their life off course and starts the story.
- Goal. Something concrete they actively pursue, that we could watch them succeed or fail at. "Win back her daughter's custody" works; "find happiness" doesn't.
- Obstacle. The antagonist, force or inner flaw that makes the goal hard. The stronger it is, the more story you have.
- Stakes. What they lose if they fail. Stakes make the reader care about the outcome.
How to use this generator
Answer each question in a few words, written so it fits into a sentence: the goal as an action ("find him by sunrise"), the obstacle and stakes as things ("a cartel that owns the police", "the only family she has left"). The builder slots your words into six common logline shapes and shows each one with a word count. None of it is AI: the sentences are fixed templates, so the result is your idea in your words.
Read them aloud and pick the one that sounds most like your film, then edit it by hand. Templates get you a grammatical first version; the final logline usually needs one more pass to swap a flat word for a specific one.
Tips for a stronger logline
- Keep it to one sentence of about 25 to 50 words.
- Use active, specific verbs. "Hunts", "smuggles" and "confesses" beat "deals with" and "goes through".
- Find the irony: a germaphobe forced to work in a sewer is more interesting than a plumber.
- Let the genre show through the words, so a horror logline feels like horror before anyone says so.
- Don't give away the ending, and don't list subplots. One character, one goal, one big obstacle.
- Test it on someone who knows nothing about the project. If they ask "and then what?", it's working.
Where to go next
The free course lesson Premise and logline goes deeper on finding the idea behind your film, and Structure for short films shows how the logline's parts become the beginning, middle and end. When you're ready to write, the free screenplay editor formats the script as you type.