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

Given the same footage, for a great editor, editing is not just about arranging and combining shots, but about arranging and combining emotions.

In previous videos/articles, I’ve mentioned the “six rules of perfect editing” more than once; today let’s break them down in detail.

The six rules of perfect editing:

1. Emotion (51%)

2. Story (23%)

3. Rhythm (10%)

4. Eye-trace (7%)

5. Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%)

6. Three-dimensional space continuity (4%)

These are from the editing “bible” proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now).

Look at the weight of these six rules:

The last three, which are the least important (eye-trace | two-dimensional characteristics | three-dimensional continuity), are exactly what we colloquially call “editing technique” or “editing theory”: for example, the relationship between eyeline and camera direction, match cuts, avoiding jump cuts, matching action continuity in editing, and so on — all the academic theories you see in textbooks.

In contrast, the first three, which are the most important, have nothing to do with these technical requirements.

So what exactly does this top-ranked, most important item “emotion” refer to? One example will make it clear:

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

Editor Murch explained his thinking when cutting this shot:

“As long as you can imagine his thoughts continuing with the sea, that’s how long you can hold the shot.”

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

Even in the “frantic, fragmented” editing style of Requiem for a Dream (the whole film has around 2,000 shots, while an average 60–90 minute film typically has only 600–700), there are still “long takes” that hold for quite some time. To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have disregarded everything and kept the cutting pace fast; wouldn’t inserting long-held shots destroy the rhythm?

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

In fact, Walter Murch’s rules of perfect editing don’t just apply to films; they apply to editing any kind of project.

We often focus too much on “technique” and overlook the most primal “emotion” that the shot conveys to the audience.

According to a strict academic approach, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and selecting footage must follow general principles such as “the shot should be stable, not shaky; the face should be clear; the composition perfectly framed...” But if we truly want a film’s emotions to be accurately presented, we often have to break these rules.

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

At the beginning of 12 Years a Slave, the shot lingers for several seconds before the dialogue starts (according to standard editing practice, it would very likely have started with dialogue right away).

These are examples of using editing to preserve emotion.

So, what a great editor pursues is to turn the question “where do I cut?” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve surely heard the saying: good editing is about telling a story, about telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a script, flat and monotonous like plain water, you won’t remember it at all, you might even start yawning. But if someone tells the story with exaggerated facial expressions, body language, rises and falls in tone, spraying spit everywhere, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it will still be quite engaging.

This is why a good director can still make something decent out of an extremely mediocre script — because they understand how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If someone says a film is good after watching it, it must have moved them emotionally. This is what people mean when they keep saying “a good editor is always telling a story.”

Back to the point at the beginning: “For an excellent editor, editing is definitely about arranging and combining emotion.”

Using a group of shots to create a montage sequence with an emotional tone of “anger” might be fairly easy.

But imagine a feature-length film whose emotional themes are not just “anger,” but also “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and so on. To weave all these emotions back together into a single work is extremely difficult.

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

That’s why being good at cutting short videos does not mean you can edit long-form content, let alone films.

But the reverse does hold true.

This is also why, if you want to really master editing, you must start from film theory.

Strip away some of the technical parts, and a good film will always have one emotional throughline pulling you along, or several emotional throughlines intertwining.

Suppose we’re editing a film with the theme of “sadness.” In the bin there are two clips of someone crying their heart out that we need to choose between:

Shot ① Normal footage, technically flawless.

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

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

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

As long as the camera captured it, whether or not “cut” was called on set, in the edit suite not a single second is “wasted footage.”