Week 2 Workshop: Pitch and premise review

Your own short film's logline meets the class for the first time, and gets tested against a dramatic question

1 March 2027

Production walkthrough: See how The Last One carried out this stage in a real production.

Before the workshop#

Bring a logline for your own short — not “Before It Stops”, your own — and a one-paragraph premise underneath it.

In the workshop#

Activity 1 — Recap and task briefing (10 min)#

Instructions: Recap the lecture’s objective/obstacle test in one sentence before starting: a logline is a claim with two testable parts, not a summary. Today’s task: bring your own logline and premise, test them on a partner, and revise if the test fails. You’ll be assessed on all three spec bullets by the end of the session.

Expected output: Your own logline and premise in front of you, and a clear statement of today’s task and how it will be checked.

Activity 2 — Warm-up: test a familiar film (10 min)#

Instructions: Ungraded — this doesn’t touch today’s spec bullets. Pick one film you already know well from this list: Jaws, Finding Nemo, Die Hard, Toy Story, The Matrix, Alien, Mad Max: Fury Road, WALL-E. In about two minutes, write a one-sentence logline for it naming the protagonist’s objective and obstacle. Trade with a partner: they read only your sentence and state the obstacle back, the same way you’ll verify each other’s real loglines later. This is the dailies-review mechanic rehearsed on a story that’s already finished, before you do it on one that isn’t.

Expected output: A tested one-sentence logline for a familiar film, and a first run at the dailies-review mechanic — your partner’s obstacle stated back correctly, or not.

Activity 3 — Write and pair up (70 min)#

Instructions: Working from the logline and premise you brought, refine your logline against the objective/obstacle test from the lecture. Check the premise with the lecture’s scope test too: name the essential observable actions, the visible change, and their estimated screen time. Can they fit two to four minutes, one location, and one or two characters without padding or exceeding those limits? Revise the premise if they cannot. These estimates help you explain filmability; they are not measured production durations.

Then check it against this week’s good-story criterion too: does your premise open on an emotional hook — something the audience already feels — rather than a recap of who everyone is? Are you relying on dialogue exposition or internal monologue to carry feeling the audience should be reading in behaviour instead? If either has crept in, cut it and replace it with an observable action, the way “Before It Stops” replaces backstory with the phone ringing.

Then pair up. Read your logline aloud to your partner — premise still face-down or unread — and ask the class’s one standing question: so what happens if they don’t get it? If you can’t answer it in a sentence, the logline isn’t finished yet; revise it on the spot and re-test before moving on.

Expected output: A logline that passes the objective/obstacle test and survives the “so what happens if they don’t get it?” question, and a premise that passes the scope test and the emotional-hook criterion.

Activity 4 — Dailies review (20 min)#

Instructions: Trade roles twice, once presenting your own logline, once reviewing your partner’s:

• As the reviewer, having read only your partner’s logline — not their premise — state their protagonist’s obstacle back in your own words. You are not repeating their sentence; you are saying what you understood the obstacle to be.
• As the director, listen without correcting. Only once your partner has stated the obstacle do you reveal your premise and say whether they got it — and if they didn’t, which part of the logline let them down: no stated obstacle, an obstacle that read as a mood rather than something concrete, or stakes that overshadowed it.

Swap roles and repeat, then compare: did stating the obstacle back correctly take one read of the logline, or did it need the premise to make sense? A logline that only works with the premise attached hasn’t passed the test yet.

Expected output: Both partners’ obstacles stated back from the logline alone, each confirmed or corrected against the premise, and a verdict on whether either logline still needs the premise attached to make sense.

Activity 5 — Completion check (10 min)#

Instructions: Walk the three spec bullets as a checklist: a logline naming protagonist, want, and obstacle; a premise that’s filmable in two to four minutes with one or two characters and one location; and your partner’s independent read of the obstacle from the logline alone. Submit all three together.

Expected output: All three spec bullets confirmed against your logline and premise, submitted together.

Afterwards#

Your logline is the fixed point every later week’s work gets checked against. If it changes later, that’s expected — but it changes on purpose, not by drift.