Juan Mendoza: Marketing/pr, motion graphic design and researcher in Melbourne, Australia.

Thanks for sharing, Juan. Great to have you here. Best of luck with the projects.

Welcome JR! You're definitely in the right place to meet people and find some awesome projects. Best wishes to you in your writing!

@ Phillip Parker -- I found your Website how-to reference very helpful. It helped me to refine my previous attempt. In 1870, a susceptible young blacksmith learns that he is adopted, causing him to travel to Texas town to learn the truth about his family, which makes him become so involved with a greedy and vengful grab for crude oil that he might lose the girl he loves.

A little wordsmithing: In 1870, a naive young blacksmith learns that he is adopted, causing him to travel to a Texas town to learn the truth about his family, which so embroils him in a fight against a greedy and vengeful grab for crude oil that he might lose the girl he loves.

In your logline you need to make sure there is a connection between your different elements Gregory. You mention he is a blacksmith, but in your logline it doesn't tell us why that is important. His job should be part of the solution or problem that is central to your story or don't put it in at all. Describe the hero in terms of his attitudes instead maybe, e.g. a cocky romeo, a lazy drifter, etc. Whatever your description, it should show us he is ill-suited to solve the problem at hand so we know he has to change to succeed. Also, the "lose the girl he loves" is a bit random and doesn't feel connected to the grab for oil.... or that he is a blacksmith. An example of 'connecting the elements in a logline' -- look at one for DIE HARD- a cop has to stop terrorists in order to save his wife (the bare bones version of that logline). See how those elements all relate to one another as a complete story? Hope that helps :)

The simple thing is this: Your antagonist is somebody who has goals that oppose the protagonist. They are the character your audience roots against. In MOST stories they're a villain - that is, the protagonist is "good" and the antagonist "evil," possibly with some shading. They don't have to be. Where you should start is "What is your villain's goal and how does it intercept your protagonist's goal." Your villain wants something. Simplistically, this could be power or wealth. It could be attention (most serial killers). In some stories the GOAL of the villain may be good, but the way they get there is bad. (We'll fix global warming by killing a ton of people, for example). Some protagonist/antagonist pairs even have the SAME goal - Professor X and Magneto being a classic example of this. So one approach is to give the villain a goal with which people sympathize, such as "Protect my people." Twist that a little bit and you get Magneto - "Protect mutants at all costs". Twist it even further...and you get Adolf Hitler actively protecting "his people" through genocide.

One of my most favorite villains is Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) from Bridge on the River Kwai and I think it's because he saw himself as anything but a villain. From his perspective, Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) was the villain.

I remember Tolstoy saying something like the best stories aren't good versus evil but good versus good.

@Erik I think you are exactly right. Even down to the observations about Hitler.

This brings a question in my mind; It seems like the what you're getting at is a lack of introspection on the part of the villain about what they are doing. Or at the very least, just not caring about the harm.

I'm sure Hitler knew he was harming six million Jews and 22 million Russians. I don't think he was ignorant of that. But, he felt there was some perverse "greater good" that he was in provenance of (which you mention) that made those facts "less important" in his mind than what he was doing. I don't think this was "ignorance" - I think it was calculated and purposeful.

Movie villains these days don't seem to have the weight of that kind of horribleness. The example I gave was of Fletcher in Whiplash - he wouldn't even be a fly in Hitler's fruit salad compared to Hitler himself.