Cyber
After being augmented against her will, a street-girl from a futuristic city must avoid capture by both former allies as well as the wealthy caste — sparking a civil war in which only the strongest survive.
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Not bad,
I just found the word “augmented” not clear enough, and maybe you could mention a ‘positive’ goal (you have just a ‘negative’ goal: escape).
“After being cybernetically augmented against her will, a street-girl from a futuristic city must secure her survival and avoid capture by both former allies as well as the wealthy caste ? sparking a civil war in which only the strongest survive.”
I think I just added another negative goal… She’s basically trying to stop her body from rejecting her augmentations, which are slowly killing her.
I’m not sure there is a positive goal.
Thanks for the feedback.
It’s hard to create a good character and a good logline,
try to read this article I found to understand the difference between positive goals and negative goals:
http://www.swoonreads.com/blog/positive-and-negative-goals-for-characters
Somewhere I read about the film “the fugitive”: it may seem a film where the MC just need to run and avoid capture but (negative) it is truly a film where the MC wants to find the real murder of his wife and clear his reputation (positive). Think about the many films you’ve seen where you have a character who need to avoid capture and try to see if you can find also a positive goal.
The reason of this necessity of a positive goal seems to be that when a character has a positive goal you can build a better connection with him, so the character is more interesting and the audience enjoys the movie better.
Very often I see here writers add a “rescue” goal, like to rescue his son/sister. It’s a very common solution and many movies use it. It can work but it seems to me too common to really capture the reader.
The theory of Truby (“Anathomy of a story) is that every element in the movie must be connected to the whole – maybe try to find something that works with your idea of an “augmented” woman.
Have you seen “Lucy”? They say it sucks but the story is similar to your story so you can analyze this movie to do it better.
Thanks, that was very helpful.
“After being cybernetically augmented against her will, a street-girl from a futuristic city endeavors to destroy the company that captured her, all the while avoiding capture by both them and former allies, which leads to a civil war.”
You might want to avoid using the term ‘futuristic’ unless the story takes place in the present (2015)
Because ‘futuristic’ mean something that exist in the present which is ahead of it’s time.
I understand that the augmentation appears to be a major part of the story and the civil war may comes across as a ticking time bomb but neither actually achieve their goal in the logline.
“…cybernetically augmented?” reads convoluted and the civil war has no connection to the inciting incident in the logline.
The basic story is about a girl who is captured then physically altered and seeks revenge on her captures before escaping right?
The civil war is unrelated to this simple plot in my mind the logline can do with out it being mentioned.
Better to simplify the inciting incident and use terms that are clear and easy to understand. Also a good hero is just that a hero and takes action to do good for others as well as them selves so best to give her a noble goal not just a personal revenge one.
Also would be great if you could introduce a central antagonistic character.
Just a suggestion:
After a street-girl is captured and experimented on by a cyber-medical company she must fight to escape and stop the company from carrying out further experiments on other victims.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the responses.
Nir Shelter, the civil war begins due to the girls capture and experimentation as the wealthy, augmented caste are attacked out of anger by the poorer, non-enhanced caste. I’m not sure if this is justification enough to include the civil war part in the logline – any opinion after the explanation?
Also, I want the girl to not necessarily be a hero. Her goal is to save her own life, and doesn’t care about others. I guess that can be her transformation, but that would only then be at the end when destroying the company.
Thanks for the feedback!
If I understand it correctly, the girl is in the middle of a war between the ‘poor’ and the ‘wealthy/augmented’ and everyone is against her (the poor are against her because now she is ‘augmented’, the wealthy because she’s a rebel).
This logline is trickier than I thought.
“a street-girl from a futuristic city endeavors to destroy the company that captured her”: I still think this goal is not very compelling. Why does she need to do this? She gained new superpowers for free. Focus about her real problem.
Revenge is not as easy as it may seem. Think about what happened to “the bride” in kill bill. V for vendetta (and he has a big goal).
Well, her real problem is that she is dying (enhancements slowly killing her) and only the company that experimented on her can help her – except she doesn’t want to get captured again (hence her trying to both save herself and get revenge at the same time).
Nir Shelter was perhaps correct in suggesting that I remove the civil war part, but it’s integral to the story, and I feel that it will be difficult to picture the film concept without mentioning it.
Thanks!
If her goal is to survive then revenge is not a solution and to destroy the cybernetic center can’t help.
“When a street girl is transformed into a deadly cyborg with a short life expectancy, she…”
>>>Also, I want the girl to not necessarily be a hero…
So I want to pay my money, invest my time in watching the struggle of the character anyway because…???
The concept has much in common with Blade Runner now. The bio medical company enhanced the characters abilities but in the same process put a limit on the characters life and now the character wants to extended her life. The revenge aspect seams contradictory to this if she is trying to bring them down she will likely not succeed in extending her life.
I think best to clarify which of these two goals will serve the story better and make it more interesting. Her fighting to live longer or her fighting to stop the company doing what they do.
Blade Runner focused on the MCs journey and outer goal not the environment and for a reason. His journey and action was more interesting and the plot around him more engaging than the environment.
Unless her actions will directly affect the outcome of the war around her I don’t think the war has any place in the logline.
Lastly as DPG said if she ain’t a hero why would the audience care about her and want to see her story?
Because she’s an anti-hero. Like in Elysium, the main character’s goal is to help himself only. He has a change of heart only at the climax of the film.
Great, thanks for the help!
>>>Like in Elysium
Which I thought was a waste of my time and money because of a flawed plot. And it didn’t break even at the box office.
Whatever, my jest was to the point out that I don’t see how your main character can be construed as an anti-hero. Anyone with the courage to take on an evil system for a just cause is not an anti-hero (even if initially it’s all personal — she’s doing it for herself; there is no other stakeholder).
Max has just cause for what he does. He’s been exploited, mortally abused, and dumped like so much garbage. He’s not raising hell just to raise hell. He has a positive goal: get to the medical equipment that will heal him.
Ditto your character.
[Further, the movie establishes a relationship with Frey going back to their youth in the opening scene which is how the plot sets up sacrificing his life for the sake of her son. Max is not totally isolate/alienated from everyone, has no personal relationships.]
I dunno about shoe horning the civil war into the logline. Information overload. And personal struggles usually make for more compelling loglines than political ones. Particularly if the civil war is an unintended consequence of the personal struggle (as, say, was the case with Katniss Everdeen in the 1st 2″ Hunger Games” movies).
dpg, why would a film about an anti-hero be uninteresting? I mean V from “V for Vendetta” is an anti-hero, Daniel from “There will be blood”, Tyler from “Fight Club”, and now a Suicide Squad movie is being released. An anti-hero just lacks heroic qualities.
But I do see your point. Thanks for the input
We may not be on the same page as to the definition of a hero versus an anti-hero. Here’s mine:
A hero is someone whose struggle I sympathize with, whose motivation I can identify with, whose goal I can root for. I can sympathize… identify… root for Max in Elysium. Ditto V in Vendetta because they have just cause, righteous reasons for what they are doing — they are fighting back against tyranny and exploitation. How can someone fighting the bad guys be characterized as an anti-hero?
As stated — or as I understand your logline — your protagonist passes my test for a hero, not an anti-hero.
An anti-hero is someone who I don’t sympathize with, whose motivation I don’t identify with or like, whose goal I’m not inclined to root for. But who is compelling to watch, nonetheless. Like Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood”. The movie is a masterful study in the ancient Greek tragic notion that character is fate.
How do you define them?
Well I think of an anti-hero as someone without typical “good” qualities, but somehow does the “good” or “right” thing, even if it’s just a consequence of reaching their goal. With anti-heroes, I feel it may be closer to reality and thus one can find parallels with them in daily life, and maybe relate to them (rather save your own life than that of someone you don’t know for instance).
To me, a hero always tries to do the right thing, and has strong moral views. They think of others before themselves. Their goals tend to benefit many people, not just themselves.
I don’t have much experience writing, so I could be completely wrong, but from what I’ve seen and read up that’s how I would define them.
Either way, I don’t think it really matters whether my main character comes across as a hero or anti-hero in the logline; does it?
Also, I’ll remove the civil war part from the logline.
Thanks for the reply!
A logline is a sales tool where every word matters. Ditto a story pitch. “Hero” raises one set of connotations (the kind that usually interests directors, producers, actors), anti-hero raises another set of connotations that often (but not always) making the concept harder to sell.
So yeah, whether you yourself pitch the story with the protagonist cast as a hero or anti-hero makes a big difference.
In drama, most hero journeys do not start out with a main character wanting to “save the world”. Far from it, the protagonist just wants to save herself, advance her own narrow interest, achieve a purely personal goal. But in the course of the story , the journey, the scope of the struggle expands, the stakes escalate so that she ends up “saving the world” or at least a lot more people than she originally intended.
Does Katniss Everdeen start out wanting to incite a rebellion against the despotism of Panem? Far from it. Does that make her any less of a hero? On the contrary.
I’d like to reiterate an important point FFF made earlier in this thread. That is, in a logline, the protagonist’s struggle MUST be cast in positive terms. She must be doing more than fleeing a negative situation, she must also be struggling toward a positive outcome, a constructive change in her situation.
The logline is usually more effective when it emphasizes what she’s struggling toward, not fleeing from.
fwiw.
And yet, I do not have to mention the fact that she is a hero or anti-hero in the logline at all. What she is depends on the goal and motivations.
Also, Katniss is just a symbol for the rebellion, and actually in the end kills the person involved in the death of her sister – revenge killing. The president dies by laughing (choking on his own blood). I fail to see how she can be considered a hero, more like a person just along for the ride. She doesn’t even lead the rebellion in any way – it could exist without her after the second hunger games. Granted, they could have changed this for the movies (only seen the first one), yet people still found the story interesting enough to adapt them. I appreciate the discussion.
Anyway, back to my logline, I’m a bit confused as to which goal everyone finds more compelling (or if none of them are). Is her goal of surviving compelling/positive enough? I was told that the story needed something else to separate it from all the other chase movies out there – hence the addition of the civil war and the destruction of the facility to the logline.
If Katniss Everdeen is not the hero, aka: the protagonist, aka: main character, of the “Hunger Games” saga — who is?
We are so obviously not on the same page as to the definition of basic terms, that I don’t know what else to say. Except that by the dramatic conventions of modern cinema, while struggling to merely survive is a positive goal, it isn’t enough to sell a movie concept. It isn’t enough for a protagonist to escape the clutches of her tormentor, to run away. Eventually she must confront her antagonist (who, btw, is???) in a High Noon showdown, aka: the Obligatory Scene.
I’m not making this up as I go along. And neither are the others, FFF and Nir Shelter. Our concerns are informed by our knowledge of standard industry definitions and expectations.
I think you have a potentially interesting hook. I say potentially because “augmented” suggests something interesting, but I’m not clear as to what “augmentation” is. I think the nature of the augmentation needs to be made more specific.
And I suggest that the story that flows from that augmentation needs to be organic, causal. IOW: don’t throw in a civil war just because you think it spices up the plot. There ought to be a clear, logical, cause and effect relationship between her being “augmented” against her will and whatever happens after that. Plot points should fall in sequence like dominoes.
I, for one, am intrigued — but not hooked. I’m circling around the bait — but not taking a bite.
fwiw