There is a lot to respond to here and for lack of time I have to choose.

These loglines were indeed picked from the Screen Australia web site. Technically they are not necessarily loglines – I think. I am not certain that SA picks for their web site what was submitted as ‘the logline’ as such. But it is striking that some look like loglines while others look like a different beast altogether. Whatever is the intention, something is not quite right.

What matters here, is that these are the sentences communicating to the tax payers where their money goes. And as a tax payer I find this plain insulting.

They’re bad. They’re awful. It is a complete outrage. And to me it is undeniable evidence of the incompetence of some people in the chain leading to funding, or publication of the funding decisions.

“Are readers of this blog aware of that? Are all the judges even aware of that?”

They may not be. But this is not the main point of this article series. There are two objectives:

1) Writers need to learn to write loglines, which I believe can be taught by showing the process when we start with a flawed version and point at what is wrong, then suggest improvements.

2) I would like the decision makers to become aware that we see their stupidity and incompetence, hopefully they’ll feel duly embarrassed and do something about it (well, here I’m probably being naive).

On the other hand, I agree we need to give examples of good loglines, too. In this respect I’m working on something for https://loglineit.com that deals with this.

Thank you for your feedback, I love to keep this dialogue open.

If Clive is right, and these projects really have been funded here, then God help our industry :(

Is it any wonder so many Aussies aim for Hollywood & ignore Ozzywood?

But this completely misses the point. These two log lines (and others reviewed in the past) have already been approved for development funding by Australian funding bodies. Are readers of this blog aware of that? Are all the judges even aware of that?

If the criticism is that films based on these log lines will be of little or no interest to a paying cinema audience, either in Australia or the wider world, then I completely agree. But this is a criticism of the government subsidised film industry in Australia, not of these log lines.

These log lines, and others you’ve reviewed, are all WILDLY SUCCESSFUL as log lines, for the simply reason that they got the writer a paying gig. Something readers of this blog (myself included), and I suspect the judges here all struggle to do.

(Incidentally, ‘based on her own novel’ was, I’m sure, the key selling point of that log line, as the novelist in question was Julia Leigh.)

The subtext here seems to be this – many of us disagree with what the funding bodies do with their money, and yet we allow their decisions to dominate our thinking. But the Producer Offset allows us to make films with 40 per cent of the money from the government, without the funding bodies ever having to give their approval. The threshold has even been reduced to $0.5m.

If we want to make films that audiences want to see, let’s analyse some log lines from writers who are trying to do just that. Not log lines from writers who are already going down a different path.