A Logline a Day

When the members of the Virtue Squad, a superhero team, are all killed by a new supervillain, their sidekicks and powerless allies are the only ones left to stop the villain.

I'm not one to let myself off the hook when the entire point of this blog is to, you know, put myself on the hook. However, I very much am someone who's into round numbers and simple patterns. I started with the whole Quality kick in the middle of things, so it's not all quite as round as I'd like, and the timing is weird with the 10-Page Treatments.

Next week, I'll be starting work on my first screenplay based off of one of my 10-Page Treatments. I'll work on that for four months. But one month from next week, I'm scheduled to finish my first Quality 10-Page Treatment and start my second, which also is worked on for four months. And I'd like those two four-month cycles to fit together better, basically.

I could move things up and finish the 10-Page treatment this week, but it's just not ready. Delaying it an extra three months to make it match up with the the Quantity first drafts seems a little excessive, too. So I've decided I'm instead g…

When the mystically empowered guardian of a temple shrine profanes the shrine by killing a man who sought forgiveness, he runs away to continue enacting his own perception of justice; and the only one who can stop him is the temple's 80-year-old abbot.

When a superpowered government test subject breaks loose and starts wreaking havoc, his sister has to find a way to stop him before the government decides he's too dangerous to take him alive.

This week's theme is supervillains. Specifically, supervillains without superheroes. Movies where the bad guy is magic, and the protagonist has to stop him without any magic of her own - or at least, the movie is about her trying to get the magic to fight the bad guy. I'm okay with there being a superhero at the end. But only at the end.

I really like how this one turned out. It still could've benefited from another day or two of work, but this is already one of my longer 3-page treatments, so that work would've actually been polishing, rather than adding content. Which is cool! I feel like that means I'm getting better at writing quickly.

I think part of it is that I've started outlining less? Which is interesting to me. Maybe I'll write a post about it sometime.

Anyway, the original logline:
When an Inuit shaman's village starts starving to death, she goes on a spiritual quest to discover the source of their misfortune, and to reverse it.

In a future where animal DNA is spliced into humans, when a madman does the opposite and turns intelligent animals into an army, a small band of rebels rises to stop him and force him out of their city.

An adopted Canadian girl discovers she's a werewolf, and goes on a quest among the supernatural community to find out about her heritage.

When an athletic housecat belonging to an old Irish couple hears that the King of the Cats is dead, and he's next in line for the throne, he has to get to the feline court while avoiding the assassins sent by his rivals.

When a man buys a cheetah to convince his wife that they couldn't handle having a baby, she's convinced - because the cheetah is definitely too much for them to handle.

After running away and joining the circus, a young girl befriends the animals, especially the lions. When she realizes how unhappy the animals are, though, she plots to free them and release them into the wild.

Just a heads-up, I'm going to be going on vacation next week, so there won't be any updates then. I... don't really know what else to say about that.

When an 8-year-old girl is the only survivor of a plane crash in Cameroon, she's left alone to die in the wilderness - until a chimpanzee adopts her into its family.

This week's theme is animals. Whether it's some animated children's movie with talking animals; a grim, Planet of the Apes style sci-fi; or one of those movies about a dog that dies at the end; animals will all feature prominently.

This treatment is weird.

It's not bad! It's good. Well, I think it's good. But whereas my treatments in the past have been written kind of (kind of) like a very short story, this one reads a little bit like a list of bullet points. And that's probably because it was written as a list of bullet points.

I was working full-time again this week, you see, so I knew I needed to try something different to make sure this week's treatment wasn't so... well, bad. Given that the biggest problem with last week's treatment was the basic structure, I wanted to focus on structure and basic plot for this week. So, I made a bigger outline than normal, and pretty much just kept stretching it until it was a full treatment.

So while the core idea itself is solid, the treatment itself isn't as casual a read as most of the others. I don't think that's an inherently bad thing - it could even be a good thing, and I'll probably fool around with this method of writin…

After suffering a spectacular bankruptcy, a once-promising executive takes a job with his slacker brother whose website inexplicably made him a millionaire.

Generated with Lance and Eskimo's Random Movie Title Generator

An newbie ghost hunter who doesn't quite believe in ghosts encounters the spirit of a street urchin who died alone in a gutter. She has to help the spirit find peace and move on, but neither of them have any idea how to do it, or why he's still here.

Title generated by ruggenberg.nl's Title Generator

When a ship sent to the center of the sun finds a dark god trapped inside of it, the crew is tainted by the experience. The captain has to make certain that none of the crew has been contaminated by the darkness before he can allow them to return to Earth.

Title generated by Fantasy Name Generators' Book Title Generator

When an Inuit shaman's village starts starving to death, he goes on a spiritual quest to discover the source of their misfortune, and to reverse it.

Title generated by the Random Book Title Generator.

Decades after her marvelous adventures with Peter Pan, a middle-aged Wendy has to travel back to Neverland to convince her daughter to come back home - and to convince Peter to stop chasing her.
Title generated by the Movie/Film Name Generator

When a young entrepreneur's business model threatens a major wall street executive's bottom line, she'll stop at nothing to see the startup fail.

Title generated by the Seventh Sanctum B Movie Titler.

This week, my pick is:

The Mantle of Power
When a street urchin stumbles upon a wizard's mantle of unparalleled power, she uses it to force her way to the top of the social ladder. But when dozens of power-hungry sorcerers come seeking the mantle, she has to fight to keep it - and try not to destroy the city in the process.

Magic is most interesting when it clashes with our rational world, and this logline has a lot of interesting moving parts. You have our hero, who we want to see succeed because undoubtedly she's been spat on and discounted her whole life; you have the mantle itself, which suddenly changes her entire world and now she becomes top dog (and we can probably assume that some of the power will go to her head and she might make a bad decision or two); and then you have these other sorcerers who, even if they're not as powerful as she is, they're certainly more learned in the magical arts.

This idea has a good amount of conflict, and everybody loves a good u…

This week, I'll be scouring the Googles to find random movie title generators of all sorts. I'll generate a couple (no more than a couple) titles, and pick one to write a logline for. Then the next day, I'll find a new title generator!

I'm not going to sugarcoat this: This treatment sucks.

I took on some temp work this week,  but even though it's temporary, it's full-time, and so I just plain didn't put in the time this treatment needed. I really wanted to not post it, but that would ruin the entire point of this blog, so.

I'll be working full-time next week, too, but after a treatment like this, you can be certain that I'll be putting devoting more off-time to writing next week's treatment.

It's sad, too, because I feel like this one could be really fun with more effort. Oh well. Hopefully I'll read this in a couple days and realize it's not as bad as my sleep-addled brain is telling me it is! Right? Right?

For reference, the logline:
After being dropped by her agent and kicked out of her apartment, a wannabe actress takes a job as a hitman, and turns out to be pretty good at it.

When the Mongol hordes threaten to overwhelm Japan, the sorceress who broke the storm god Raijin's heart is the only one who can convince him to save Japan. But in order to do that, she has to get to him before the Mongols do.

When a scientist in the year 3200 invents magic in an effort to reverse entropy, she has to venture to the center of the universe in order to achieve her final goal. 

An American tourist visiting the Middle East accidentally becomes involved with a band of djinn rebelling against a tyrannical marid.

So apparently I get to pick two this time! One for Quantity and one for Quality. I feel like that makes things easier because I really liked this batch and would have had a hard time picking just one. Good job husband! Also, you are a mean, mean husband who makes my job too difficult...

Treatment 13
Treatment 14
Treatment 15
Treatment 16
Treatment 17


Black Magic Grandma This one is a good deal better than his first attempt at comedy, I'd say. I also really like the concept, and I think he did a good job of fleshing it out. But, I don't think it is making it into the top two. There some others I like a lot, you see.

The Chosen One I think this one is lacking motivation. Why is Gunda determined to fulfill the prophecy even though her parents don't want her to? Why don't her parents want her to? Where was the tension there? What makes the king or Qirsh an exception that actually wants to help? And was Gunda always ok with tyrants and becoming one? There just wasn't enough …

A genie recounts the thousand-year tale of a man who wished for immortality to a young Moroccan scholar in order to prevent her from doing the same.

When a street urchin stumbles upon a wizard's mantle of unparalleled power, she uses it to force her way to the top of the social ladder. But when dozens of power-hungry sorcerers come seeking the mantle, she has to fight to keep it - and try not to destroy the city in the process.