Interpreting the Editing Style of Confessions >

4+1W, which is 5W.

5W is a term used in information science research. It means the information research process can be divided into five parts: research on the information communicator (who: who is spreading the information), research on the information itself (what: what information is being spread), media research (which: through what channels and in what ways the information is spread), research on information users (whom: to whom the information is being spread), and research on information benefits and effects (how: how the information produces utility).

This pattern is also the basis of modern news reporting:

who (who) — person

when (when) — time

where (where) — place

what (what) — event

why (why) — reason

A news report needs to include all five points to be considered complete. You don’t need to understand communication studies to see this—just watch a single episode of the evening news. For ordinary viewers to fully grasp a news story, it has to be built on these five points. This is the basic writing competence a reporter must have.

But in film, there is often one W that is not written, or rather, is deliberately concealed by the screenwriter.

Not just in film—works that tell stories like narrative poetry, drama, and novels generally (in most scenes/sections) hide this W:

someone or something — (subject) … character (Who)

doing something — (event) … action (What)

at a certain time and place — (background) … environment (When/Where)

The W that is hidden is Why, which is the reason, the motivation.

Take the opening scene of the film Confessions as an example. The teacher keeps droning on in a monologue—starting with herself, then talking about her family, then moving on to the school. Meanwhile, the classroom full of troubled teens has long descended into chaos. They joke around and horseplay in complete disorder, and the teacher turns a blind eye to this chaos…

This scene has all four basic Ws: the teacher (Who) is lecturing (What) in the classroom (Where) during the day (When). But… clearly no one is listening. The students ignore the teacher’s existence, and the teacher is likewise ignoring the students’ existence.

The one W missing here is the teacher’s motivation.

This creates a kind of dramatic conflict — why is the teacher behaving like this?

The hidden W often forms a hook that keeps the audience watching.

In most cases, of course, this sort of device is something the screenwriter has already predetermined.

The screenwriting of Confessions is itself very sophisticated. This W (motivation) is two‑sided: it completely hides the reason why the teacher is doing this, and at the same time uses events to indirectly explain why the students are behaving as they are—after all, these students are already problem children with no sense of discipline.

But what we want to focus on is: what is the editor’s job here?

What editing needs to do is magnify the key ideas within those four Ws, and lay the groundwork for the reveal of the fifth W.

Among the four Ws in this scene, time (When) and setting (Where) are not that important for editing. The oppressive atmosphere has already been created through production design, lighting, and composition in pre‑production.

What the editing needs to emphasize is the idea of a “chaotic classroom” and a “teacher who doesn’t care.”

How does Confessions achieve this? By using sound.

No matter what the students are doing or what the teacher is saying, the soundtrack always has the chaotic classroom ambience as a base layer. And the film’s sound editing is entirely subjective from an editorial standpoint; it abandons the sound‑editing approach based on “realism.” In some shots, the ambient noise is very loud and the teacher’s voice is very quiet; in other shots, the ambient noise is very soft and the teacher’s voice suddenly becomes unusually clear. This depends entirely on whether the editor wants the audience to hear the teacher’s lines clearly. In other words, this is the edit manipulating the audience, telling them which lines are important by turning up the volume for them.

Until the teacher drops this line: “I want to kill him.”

Only then does the final W surface. At this point the audience realizes that the teacher is out for revenge, and her previous actions are suddenly backed by a clear motivation.

Here, the editing uses an abrupt stop in the sound, with a wide shot locking the rhythm in place. The contrast between sound and silence makes this line of dialogue feel even more meaningful.

Of course, editing can only play an embellishing role: the heavy use of music‑video‑style slow motion also gives this “lecture” sequence a stronger sense of ritual and a more aesthetic quality.

When editing a scene, we must always pay attention to the “presence” of these five Ws. Wherever there is room to do something interesting, it will almost certainly lie in the W that’s being hidden.

I’ve also done a detailed breakdown of the film Confessions before: