The Key Element of Editing a Good Piece: “Emotion”

When faced with the same set of footage, for an excellent editor, editing is definitely not just about arranging and combining shots, but about arranging and combining “emotions.”

In previous videos/articles, I’ve mentioned more than once the “Six Rules of Perfect Editing.” Today let’s break them down in detail.

Six Rules of Perfect Editing:

1. Emotion (51%)

2. Story (23%)

3. Rhythm (10%)

4. Eye-trace (7%)

5. Two-dimensionality (5%)

6. Three-dimensional continuity (4%)

These were proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and are seen as a kind of editing “bible.”

Look at the weight of each of these six rules:

The last three, the least important ones (eye-trace | two-dimensionality | three-dimensional continuity), are precisely what we casually refer to as “editing technique” or “editing theory”: the relationship between eye direction and camera direction, match cuts, avoiding jump cuts, matching action, continuity cuts, and so on—the whole series of academic, textbook-style theories.

In contrast, the top three most important rules actually have nothing to do with these technical requirements.

So what exactly does the highest-ranked, most important element—emotion—refer to? One example makes it clear:

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot in which, after a series of ups and downs in his life, the protagonist stands on a boat looking out at the sea. This medium shot lingers for a very long time.

Editor Walter Murch explained his thinking when cutting this shot:

“As long as you can imagine his thoughts continuing with the sea, the shot can keep going.”

That is emotion. That is the most important function of editing—narration.

Even in the “mad-dog, fragmentary” editing style of Requiem for a Dream (the film has a record-breaking ~2,000 shots, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film usually only has 600–700), there are still plenty of long takes that linger. To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have insisted on high-speed cutting at all costs. Wouldn’t inserting long-held shots destroy the rhythm?

— The editor is prioritizing the characters’ emotions. Genuine emotion can only be captured by a camera that keeps rolling.

In fact, Walter Murch’s rules of perfect editing apply not just to films—they apply to editing any project.

We often pay too much attention to “technique” and neglect the most primal “emotion” that the footage conveys to the viewer.

According to strict academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and selection must follow general principles like “steady shot, no wobble, face clearly visible, perfectly framed composition…” But if we really want a piece to present emotions accurately, we often have to break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, when the protagonist exits the frame, he accidentally bumps the camera, causing the image to shake—but the editor deliberately kept it.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot holds for several seconds before the dialogue begins (by conventional editing standards, the dialogue would likely have started right at the opening).

These are all ways that editing is used to preserve emotion.

So it seems that what a great editor seeks is to turn “where to cut” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard people say that good editing is about telling a story, telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook, flat as water, you probably won’t remember it at all and might even yawn. But if someone uses exaggerated facial expressions, body language, rising and falling intonation, spitting as they talk to tell a story, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it’ll still be captivating.

This is why a good director can still shoot a completely mediocre script and make it at least decent—because they understand how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If people who have watched a piece say it’s good, then there must have been something on an emotional level that moved them. This is what I keep repeating above: “Good editors are all storytellers.”

Back to the point from the beginning: for an excellent editor, editing is definitely about arranging and combining “emotions.”

Using a series of shots to create a montage sequence that carries a feeling of “anger” might be easy.

But in a feature-length film, the emotional themes are not just “anger”; there may also be segments of “joy,” “sorrow,” “delight,” and so on. To meld all these emotions back into a single work is extremely difficult.

For a 15-second or 20-second short video, the primary objective is to convey a single emotion.

This is why being good at editing short videos does not necessarily mean you can handle long-form work or even films.

The reverse, however, is often true.

This is also why, to really learn editing well, you must start with film theory.

Stripping away some of the technical aspects, a good piece must have one main emotional thread leading it forward—or several emotional threads intertwined.

Let’s say we’re editing a piece whose theme is “sadness,” and we have two takes to choose from in the bin, both shots of someone crying loudly:

Shot ① Normally filmed, perfectly usable, no flaws.

Shot ② Out of focus and shaky, but the crying is more heartfelt.

From a technical standpoint, shot ② is what we’d call “bad footage.”

But if you want the piece to be good, you still have to choose shot ②.

Anything the camera has captured—regardless of whether someone called “cut” or not—contains not a single “wasted shot” in the edit room.