Writing a Synopsis, a Pitch, and a One-Sheet

A synopsis is a prose summary of your entire story, ending included, usually one to two pages. A pitch is what you say out loud when someone asks what your film is about, usually under two minutes. A one-sheet is a single page, designed rather than typed, that someone can glance at and keep. Same story, three formats, three completely different jobs.

The mistake almost everyone makes is writing one of these and then reusing it as the other two. A synopsis read aloud is unbearable. A pitch printed on paper looks thin. A one-sheet emailed as a wall of text is deleted.

The synopsis

A synopsis tells the whole story in prose, in order, including how it ends.

That last part surprises people. You are not writing back-cover copy. The reader is not an audience member you are trying to intrigue; they are someone deciding whether to spend money or time, and they need to know whether the story works. Withholding the ending reads as though you do not have one.

Length. One page is standard. Two is acceptable for a feature. Anything longer is a treatment, which is a different document with a different purpose.

Tense and person. Present tense, third person, always. "Maria walks into the bar" and never "Maria walked" or "we see Maria walk".

What goes in. The protagonist and what they want. The thing that disrupts their world. What they do about it. What goes wrong. How it resolves. Roughly in that order, because that is the order the story happens in.

What stays out. Subplots that do not touch the main line. Characters who appear once. Backstory that the film reveals slowly. Your themes, stated as themes. Dialogue, mostly, though one line can be worth a paragraph if it is genuinely the line the film turns on.

The hardest discipline is cutting characters. A feature might have twenty speaking parts and a one-page synopsis can hold maybe four names before the reader loses track. Everyone else becomes "her brother", "the landlord", "a detective". If a character cannot be described by their function, they probably do not belong in the synopsis.

The pitch

A pitch is spoken. That single fact changes everything about how it is built.

Written prose can carry clauses, qualifications, and a reader who can go back a sentence. Speech cannot. A pitch has to survive being heard once, by someone who is slightly distracted, possibly standing up.

Build it in three sizes. You will need all of them and you will never know in advance which one you get to use.

1. One sentence. This is your logline. It is the answer to "what's it about" at a party.
2. Thirty seconds. The logline plus who the protagonist is, what the central problem is, and the tone. Ends on a hook rather than a resolution.
3. Two minutes. The above plus the shape of the second act, one specific scene described vividly, and why you are the person making it.

The two-minute version is the one people prepare badly. They use it to summarize plot, which is the least interesting thing they could do with two minutes of someone's attention.

A pitch is not a compressed synopsis. It is an argument that this film should exist, told through story.

Describe one scene properly. The single most effective thing in any pitch is a specific moment rendered concretely. Not "there is a lot of tension between them", but the actual image: what the room looks like, what she says, what he does not say. One vivid thirty-second scene does more than three minutes of plot mechanics, because it lets the listener see the film rather than understand it.

Say why you. Not credentials. The reason this material and this person go together. If you grew up in the town the film is set in, that is worth more than a festival laurel.

Then stop talking. The point of a pitch is to start a conversation, not to complete a transmission. Finish early and let them ask.

The one-sheet

A one-sheet is a single page combining an image, a title, a logline, a short synopsis, and the key credits. It exists to be looked at, forwarded, and left on a desk.

This is the document most first-time filmmakers skip and it is the one that circulates. Nobody forwards a pitch. People forward a good-looking page.

What is on it:

• Title, large, and a tagline if you have a good one. Skip the tagline rather than use a weak one.
• One image that establishes tone. A still if you have shot something, a reference image if you have not. It does not need to be from your film; it needs to be honest about what your film feels like.
• The logline, one sentence, prominent.
• A short synopsis, roughly 150 words. Shorter than your real synopsis, and this one may hold the ending back, because a one-sheet is closer to marketing than to a story document.
• Format and status: running time, genre, stage ("feature, in development", "short, in post").
• Key people: director, producer, and anyone attached whose name means something.
• Contact details. People forget these constantly, and a one-sheet without a way to reach you is a dead end.

What it is not. It is not a deck. A deck is ten to twenty pages with mood boards, comparable films, budget, and finance plan, and it goes to investors. A one-sheet is the thing you hand someone at a festival bar. If your one-sheet needs a second page, it is a deck.

Writing all three without repeating yourself

Write them in this order, because each one feeds the next.

Start with the logline, since it is the hardest and everything else inherits it.

Then the synopsis, because writing the whole story down in one page is what forces you to find out which parts are load-bearing. This is the document that teaches you your own film.

Then the pitch, which is the synopsis with 80 percent removed and one scene put back in full.

Then the one-sheet, which is the pitch, laid out, with a picture.

Going in the other direction almost never works. A one-sheet written first is a poster for a film you have not thought through.

The specificity rule

One habit fixes most weak versions of all three documents: replace every abstraction with the concrete thing underneath it.

"She struggles with her family's expectations" is nothing. "She is expected to take over her father's failing garage in a town where nobody drives any more" is a film. The first sentence could describe ten thousand scripts. The second could only describe yours.

Go through each document and mark every phrase that could appear unchanged in someone else's synopsis. Those phrases are where your film currently is not. Replace each one with the specific version.

Next

You have an idea, a logline, a format and the documents to describe them. Next: where film ideas legitimately come from, and what you actually own when you start writing.