The Iron Giant (1999) is an American animated science fiction action film produced by Warner Bros.
Brad Bird (director) presented the story for The Iron Giant saying “What if a gun had a soul, and didn’t want to be a gun?”. This iron giant has a soul and a moral compass – and is made believable through the close attention to detail and the mixing of tradition with modern animation techniques. – Composed by IB Film Teacher Sharon Lacoste McDonagh
What are Loglines?
Use the Logline Creator
Satchel’s Advice
In a world where ____, ____ needs to ____, otherwise ____ will happen.
The three sections of the logline are:
- World establishment/ SETTING.
- OBJECTIVE/MOTIVE for the journey.
- CONSEQUENCE/STAKES of the journey.
We need all of these to have a good story and without one of these parts, the story won’t have any motion or depth. The world establishment defines the rules and scenarios of the world we are looking into, without this we simply don’t understand the limits and nuances of the setting.
Subsequently, we need to know what journey and objective the character is trying to achieve. This piece gives the story purpose. If we have rules and purpose then we have a story, just maybe not an inspired one.
Thirdly, in order to turn a story into something interesting, we need to give it stakes. A story does not pull without something to lose. As a consequence of our character’s journey, we know that it is not purely straightforward, and it makes us WONDER and try to speculate what will happen.
In conclusion, most stories, especially when written with common thematics; are very predictable how they will end. However, our interest is held by the unknown factors and turmoil in between the start and end. We do not know what the characters will have to lose or sacrifice to get to their objective.
There is much more to worldbuilding that we can get into, however, those are the very simple factors that create an interesting story.