What Is a Logline: Formula and 30 Examples

Everyone asks for a logline: the producer, the client who ordered the video, the platform you are applying to, and in the end you yourself, when a month later you try to remember what that idea was about. They ask for one sentence and get either a page-long retelling or a pretty phrase that tells you nothing. Below: what a logline is, the four parts it is built from, how it differs from a synopsis and a tagline, 30 examples, a breakdown of a bad logline with a fix, and a checklist for testing your own

What is a logline? A simple definition

A logline is one sentence that describes the whole story: who the main character is, what they want, what stands in their way and what they risk. A logline does not retell the plot in order and does not tease for the sake of teasing - it shows whether there is a story in the idea at all. If nothing comes together in one sentence, there is nothing to put together yet

The term comes from "log line" - a line in a log. How it entered film practice is not reliably known: by one popular version it was a note on a script's folder or spine, another explains it through the one-line description of a film in a TV listing. Neither is confirmed, so treat both as industry legend

The usual size is 25–50 words, one sentence, two at most: by the third, a person stops holding the construction in their head and the test stops working. A logline is written first of all not for the producer but for the author - it is the cheapest way to find out that a story does not hold together, before the footage is shot and two months are spent

Advice varies - "25–30 words", "two or three sentences", "no more than fifty" - and the confusion is needless: they all describe one constraint, just counted differently. Stick to a simple rule: the line should be sayable aloud in one breath. And do not worry if yours runs longer than a textbook sample: a story nobody has heard of needs a few more words than a film everybody knows

Why you need a logline if the story is already written

One line does three different jobs

A test of the idea. While an idea lives in your head, it seems whole. Put it into a sentence and you see that there is no clear hero, the goal sounds like "figure myself out" and the obstacle is "various trials". This is not nitpicking about wording: it means they are not in the idea, and the audience will feel it twenty seconds in

A tool for conversation. A client, a co-writer, a composer and an editor all need one thing - to understand what we are making. A logline gives a shared point: after that any argument is settled by the question "does this work for our line or against it?"

A reason to say no. In long work there are always more suggestions than fit, and each on its own is not bad. A logline gives you grounds to refuse: if an idea does not move the stated goal and does not change the stated stakes, it belongs to a different story - and that is not "I don't like it" but a mismatch with what was agreed at the start

The logline formula: hero + goal + obstacle + stakes

The working formula rests on four parts. Remove any one and the sentence falls apart into a description

Part	The question it answers
Hero	Who carries the story and what situation are they in?
Goal	What are they trying to achieve, and how can you see it on screen?
Obstacle	What force stands between them and the goal?
Stakes	What do they lose if they fail?

The frame they fit into:

[Hero with one defining trait] must [specific goal], but [opposing force]; otherwise [what will be lost]

A hero is a situation, not a name. "A programmer named Alex" says nothing. "A programmer who hasn't left his apartment in four years" is already a story: you can see what any action will cost him. One precise trait is enough, two are too many

A goal needs a finish line. "Wants to be happy" is a state: you cannot film it and you cannot lose it. "Must get his son home before dawn" is a goal: you can see when it is reached and when it is failed. The hero's inner change does not go anywhere - in a logline it lives not in the goal but in the stakes

An obstacle is a force, not a circumstance. Bad weather does not get in the way by itself - it does when the hero has to walk a dozen miles through mud in a downpour and keep a pair of borrowed loafers dry. The best obstacle resists with intent: another person, a system, the hero's own fear, time. A villain is optional: an explicit antagonist appears in fewer than half the examples below, in the rest the hero is up against circumstances or against themselves

Stakes answer the question "so what?" The hero does not reach the goal - so what? If the answer is "well, that would be a shame", there is no story. Strong stakes are concrete and almost always double: what the hero loses outside (a son, a ship) and what they lose inside (the right to call themselves a father)

There are three more elements that are not part of the formula but often strengthen it: an inciting incident (what knocks the hero out of their usual life), world or genre in one word and irony - the gap between who the hero is and what they have to do. A coach who does not understand the game. A fish that is afraid of the open ocean. Irony as a near-mandatory ingredient of a logline was put forward by screenwriter Blake Snyder in Save the Cat!, and the observation holds: this gap is what most often makes a line interesting

Logline vs synopsis vs tagline: what's the difference

Four texts about one project, four different jobs. Mixing them up is the most common reason a logline does not work

	Logline	Synopsis	Treatment	Tagline
Length	1 sentence, 25–50 words	1–3 pages	A few pages to twenty	A few words
Job	Show that there is a story	Retell the whole plot	Retell scene by scene, in order	Intrigue the viewer
Ending	Depends on the version, see below	Always revealed	Always revealed	Never revealed
Who needs it	The author, the producer, the client	The producer, the editor, the platform	The director, the producer in development	The viewer, on the poster
Truth or effect	Truth about structure	Truth about events	Truth about events and tone	Effect

On one and the same story the difference is visible at once. Take Titanic

• Logline: a young woman from a once-wealthy high-society family, being married off for money, falls for a poor artist aboard a liner thought unsinkable; to choose her own life she has a few hours - the ship is already sinking
• Synopsis: the same events in order, with all the turns, names and the ending, on a page and a half
• Tagline: "Nothing on Earth could come between them" - one of the film's official taglines. Beautiful, but you cannot tell from it what the film is about, and you cannot check whether a story comes together

Two versions of a logline, and that settles half the arguments. The working version is written for yourself and your co-writers, and the ending is named outright: otherwise it is unclear how the stakes resolve. The pitch version is written for someone who must want to watch, and the ending is removed - what remains is a question. The content is the same, only the last quarter of the sentence differs. The contradictory advice "don't reveal the ending" and "the ending is required" is exactly about these two versions. The rule: while work is going on, write the working one; hand the pitch version outward

A pitch stands apart - an oral telling of one or two minutes that usually starts from the logline and then unfolds it into world, tone and a couple of scenes. So does the blurb - the copy for a streaming page, whose job is not structural but promotional. Of all six, only the logline works inward, for the author: the other five explain the story to someone else and so cannot show that there is nothing to explain yet. A logline answers whether there is a story; how to lay it out in time is in the article on three-act structure

How to write a logline: six steps

Order matters: if you start with a beautiful phrasing, you get a tagline

1. Define the hero by their situation, not their name. One line: who they are and where they stand when the story begins
2. State the goal with an action verb. "Find", "bring back", "prove", "make it in time". If no verb comes - there is no goal yet
3. Name the main opposing force. One. If there are three, the story will not fit into a sentence, and that is a signal that you have not yet decided what it is about
4. Add the stakes. Finish the phrase "if they lose, then…" aloud. The first answer is usually weak, the third is the real one
5. Put it into one sentence and throw out everything that is not one of these four parts. Names of minor characters, places, the way the world works - that goes into the synopsis
6. Read it aloud to someone who does not know the project. If they ask "but what does he want?" - you described a situation, not a story

It is normal to write eight versions: the first is almost always about the plot, not the story

30 logline examples

The first twenty-four lines are about well-known films and series. These are not the studios' official loglines but our own versions written to the formula: they show how the four parts fit familiar material. Where the ending is named outright, it is a working version; where the line stops on a question, it is a pitch version, and it is marked

The last six are teaching examples made up for this article. There are no finished videos behind them, the titles are placeholders, the running times are a guide. The first of them (25) is written for building in AI tools: the formula works the same way there, there is just even less room

Film

1. Jaws - the police chief of a seaside town, terrified of water, must close the beaches before the most profitable weekend of the year, before a great white kills again - but the mayor, for whom the town's summer income matters more than one death, will not let him. (pitch version: ending removed)
2. Alien - the crew of a commercial space tug answers a signal from a dead planet and brings aboard a creature that kills them one by one, while the company secretly wants it alive; the sole survivor has to blow up the ship - and still face the creature alone
3. The Godfather - the youngest son of a mafia family head, who has kept away from his father's business all his life, takes revenge for the attempt on his father's life and, saving his family, becomes the man he did not want to be
4. The Terminator - a waitress learns that a machine from the future has come to kill her before she can bear the son who will save humanity; the only one who can protect her is a lone soldier with neither the weapons of the future nor time. (pitch version: ending removed)
5. The Matrix - a programmer who has felt all his life that something is wrong with the world learns that reality is a simulation and has to choose: stay in a comfortable illusion or accept that only he can free people. (pitch version: ending removed)
6. The Silence of the Lambs - an FBI trainee must coax a clue about another killer out of an imprisoned cannibal psychiatrist before the killer murders the woman he has abducted, and the price of the clue will be the most personal thing she has. (pitch version: ending removed)
7. Titanic - a young woman from a once-wealthy high-society family, being married off for money, falls for a poor artist aboard a liner thought unsinkable; to choose her own life she has a few hours - the ship is already sinking. (pitch version: ending removed)
8. Finding Nemo - a clownfish terrified of the open ocean swims across half of it after his kidnapped son, counting on directions from a companion who turns out to forget everything that happened a minute ago. (pitch version: ending removed)
9. Gravity - after a shuttle is destroyed, an engineer is left alone in orbit with oxygen for a few hours and has to reach a station, though after her daughter's death she has nothing to return for. (pitch version: ending removed)
10. Parasite - a family of unemployed people get jobs in a rich household one by one, posing as professionals who do not know each other; when someone else's secret turns up in the basement, the deception can only be kept at the price of blood
11. Rocky - a small-time Philadelphia boxer, handed a shot at the heavyweight champion as a publicity stunt, has to last all fifteen rounds to prove to himself that he is more than a bum from the neighborhood, even if he cannot win
12. Back to the Future - a high-school student who accidentally travels to 1955 in a time machine stops his parents from meeting and has to bring them together again within a week before he vanishes from the family photograph, and he can get home only in the second a lightning bolt strikes the clock tower
13. Home Alone - an eight-year-old boy, left behind by mistake when his family flies off for Christmas, has to defend the house alone against two burglars who believe the whole street is empty. (pitch version: ending removed)
14. The Lion King - a lion cub who believes he caused his father's death runs from his homeland and lives carefree for years, until he learns that the uncle who seized power is ruining the Pride Lands; to return means to face what he ran from. (pitch version: ending removed)
15. The Truman Show - an insurance agent who has lived all his life in one seaside town begins to suspect that he is being watched around the clock; to learn the truth he will have to go out onto the sea he has feared since childhood. (pitch version: ending removed)
16. Groundhog Day - an arrogant TV weatherman sent to cover a small-town festival wakes up to the same day again and again, and to get out of the loop he has to become a man worthy of the love of the producer he cannot win over. (pitch version: ending removed)
17. The Martian - an astronaut whom the crew, evacuating, took for dead and left on Mars has to grow food on a planet where nothing grows and survive until a rescue that can't arrive before his supplies run out. (pitch version: ending removed)

Series

18. Breaking Bad - a man who has settled for less all his life gets a terminal diagnosis and turns his wasted talent for chemistry to cooking meth to leave his family money - and discovers that for the first time in his life he likes being dangerous
19. Chernobyl - a scientist who alone understands the scale of the accident must make the state admit it out loud while it is not yet too late to evacuate people, and the price of the truth will be his own life
20. Stranger Things - three schoolboys search for a missing friend and instead find an escaped girl with powers; to bring their friend back from the Upside Down they will have to go against the laboratory that opened the passage. (pitch version: ending removed)
21. Ted Lasso - an American football coach comes to run an English soccer club without understanding the game, and does not know that the owner hired him to make the club fall apart; all he has is relentless optimism. (pitch version: ending removed)
22. Squid Game - a divorced debtor who can't support his daughter or pay for his mother's treatment agrees to play children's games for a huge prize and learns that eliminated players are killed; the only way out is if the majority votes to stop. (pitch version: ending removed)
23. The Queen's Gambit - an orphan who discovers a gift for chess must reach a match with the strongest grandmasters in the world before the pills and the alcohol, without which she cannot see the board, consume her. (pitch version: ending removed)
24. Succession - the grown children of an aging media tycoon fight for years for the right to lead his empire, while the father, who has no intention of handing it to anyone, sets them against one another. (pitch version: ending removed)

Short videos (under a minute): teaching examples

25. The Lighthouse Keeper (a teaching example for building in AI tools, about a minute) - a lighthouse keeper on a deserted planet lights the lamp every evening for a ship that will not come; on the last evening the fuel is enough either for the lighthouse or for his own heat
26. Courier Robot (a teaching example, about 45 seconds) - a servant robot on its last charge has to carry a parcel to a door, knowing that inside is the new model that will replace it
27. Music Video (a teaching example, about 50 seconds) - a dancer rehearses a number no one will see in a theater that will be torn down tomorrow; to see it through herself she has to switch off the house lights and stay alone in the dark
28. Taxi Ad (a teaching example, 30 seconds) - a father who has missed all his daughter's performances gets stuck on the other side of the city ten minutes before her first solo number; to be late once more means to finally become the one nobody waits for
29. Vertical Video (a teaching example, about 20 seconds) - a cat left alone with a festive cake for the first time has to reach the cream before the key turns in the lock
30. Social Video (a teaching example, about a minute) - an elderly man calls his son every evening and the son does not pick up; when the son finally calls back, the father has to find the nerve to say what he has been calling to say, instead of asking about the weather

What you can see in these thirty lines. About half have a deadline or a counter: a weekend, a few hours, the last charge, a theater that comes down tomorrow. Time is the cheapest obstacle, and if a story stalls, this is the place to start fixing. An explicit antagonist appears in fewer than half: more often the hero is up against a system, circumstances or themselves. There are more pitch versions here than working ones: that is how lines sound outward, while the working ones, with a named ending, show the stakes more honestly

A word on the six short ones: the shorter the running time, the stricter the formula. A one-minute video has no room for getting to know the world, all four parts must read from the very first frame - and that is why beautiful AI videos are so often not watched to the end: the picture is there, but the line that would hold it is not

A bad logline, broken down and fixed

A live example of what people usually bring first:

"A science-fiction story about a girl in a post-apocalyptic world who is trying to find her place and meets various trials and unexpected allies on the way"

It sounds decent - and does not work. What is wrong with it:

• A hero without a situation. "A girl" is a label. Who is she here: a doctor, a looter, the only one who remembers how it used to be?
• A goal you cannot film. "Find her place" is a state, not an action: it is unclear how to judge when she has won or when she has lost
• No obstacle. "Various trials" is an admission that the antagonist has not been chosen yet
• No stakes. What happens if she does not find a place? There is no answer - the audience has nothing to fear
• Genre instead of story. "A science-fiction story about…" is how a blurb starts, not a logline

We fix it in three passes

Pass 1, define the hero and the goal. "A doctor, the only one for four villages, must reach a flooded hospital for a vaccine". Already better: there is a who, there is a what

Pass 2, add the opposing force. "…but the only road runs through territory where she is remembered as the one who refused help". The obstacle stopped being weather and became meaningful: it hits exactly this hero

Pass 3, set the stakes. "…and if she turns back, the ones who die will not be abstract people but those she has already abandoned once"

Putting it together:

The only doctor serving four villages must cross a territory where she is remembered as the one who once refused help, to bring back a vaccine - or the people she has already abandoned once will die

Thirty-six words instead of twenty-seven - nine more words, and now it is a story. Note that we did not invent a single new plot event, we only pulled out what was already in the idea and threw away the words with nothing behind them

The same diagnosis works on anyone else's line. The symptom shows in the words, and the cure is always a return to one of the four parts:

What you read in the line	What is missing	What to do
"A man", "a girl", "a guy"	The hero's situation	Add a trait that shows the price of action
"Find himself", "figure out what he wants"	A goal with a finish line	Replace with a verb you can film
"Trials", "difficulties", "obstacles"	An antagonist	Name one force that hits exactly this hero
The line ends on the goal	Stakes	Add "otherwise…" and do not take the first answer
Cannot be read in one breath	A decision about what the story is	Drop the second hero and the second line

How a logline protects your idea in front of a client

You bring a video concept, the client says "make it more dynamic" or "show our product big at the end" - and a battle of tastes begins, in which the maker has no arguments. A logline turns it into an argument about the task. Three moves

Agree on the line before the storyboard. In writing, before work starts. Changing a line costs five minutes, changing an edited video costs a week. It is also your protection when at delivery you hear "we meant something else"

Answer notes with edits to the line, not to the frame. "Let's add a chase scene" is a proposal to change the obstacle. Ask: whose goal does it move and what does the hero lose without it? No answer - the scene is not needed, and it no longer sounds like "I don't like it"

Keep the client's stake inside the line. The client has their own hero (the buyer) and their own goal. A good advertising logline describes the character's story so that their stake and the brand's promise are one and the same. Then the question "where is our product in this?" goes away on its own: the product stands exactly where the hero's fate is decided. A side effect - the budget stops growing from endless "and let's also add"

Checklist: nine questions for your logline

Every "no" is a place where the line needs rewriting

1. Is it one sentence you can say in one breath?
2. Is it clear who the hero is and what situation they are in - without a name?
3. Is the goal stated with an action verb, and can it be seen on screen?
4. Is one specific opposing force named, not "difficulties"?
5. Is it clear what the hero loses if they fail?
6. Is there a deadline, a counter or some other reason this is happening right now?
7. For the working version - is the ending named? For the pitch version you hand outward - is it removed?
8. Are the names of minor characters, places and the way the world works taken out?
9. After reading, does someone who does not know the project ask a question about the story, rather than "but what is it about"?

If there is more than one "no" on items 2–5, the problem is not the wording but the idea, and rewriting the line will not help: you need to go back to the hero, the goal, the obstacle and the stakes

Quick answers to common questions

What is a logline? One sentence about the whole story: who the hero is, what they want, what stands in their way and what they lose if they fail

How many sentences is a logline? One, two at most - and only if the second is entirely about the stakes. A third sentence means you are no longer writing a logline but a short synopsis

How many words should a logline be? 25–50. A simpler test than counting words: the line should be sayable aloud in one breath

What is the logline formula? A hero with one defining trait + a specific goal + an opposing force + stakes. The frame: "[hero] must [goal], but [obstacle]; otherwise [loss]"

What is the difference between a logline and a synopsis? A logline is one sentence that tests whether there is a story. A synopsis is a retelling of the whole plot in one to three pages, with turns, names and always with the ending

Logline vs tagline: what is the difference? A tagline is a short phrase for a poster that intrigues the viewer and promises nothing about structure. A logline is written for the author and the producer and shows the hero, the goal, the obstacle and the stakes

Should the hero be named? No: a name tells nothing to someone reading the line for the first time. The exception is a real person known to everyone: then the name already defines their situation

Can a logline reveal the ending? Depends on the version. In the working one, which you write for yourself and your co-writers - yes, otherwise the stakes and the choice the hero makes are not visible. In the pitch version handed to a producer or a client, the ending is removed and a question is left. In a synopsis the ending is always required

What is the difference between a logline and an idea? An idea is "what if…". A logline is an idea that already has a hero, a goal, an obstacle and stakes. On inspection most "ideas" turn out to be situations: a beautiful setting in which nobody wants anything

Do you need a logline for a 30-second video? Especially. In a feature, a sagging first quarter can be pulled up by the second, but in thirty seconds a missing goal is visible instantly - and the viewer leaves

Do you write a logline before the script or after? Both: before, to check that there is something to write; after, to see what the story turned into along the way. The gap between the two versions is the list of what needs rewriting

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A logline is not a literary genre and not a formality for an application. It is the fastest way to learn the truth about your idea: whether there is a story in it or so far only a mood. The line takes an hour to write and saves months

On the course "From Picture to Story" by Vadim Sotnikov, screenwriter of prime-time TV series and creative producer, participants walk this path on their own material: from a single frame to a finished line. See the course