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

When faced with the same set of footage, for a great editor, editing is definitely not just arranging and combining shots, but 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-dimensional plane of the screen (5%)

6. Three-dimensional space of action (4%)

They were proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and are often referred to as the “Bible” of editing.

Look at the weight each rule carries:

The three least important (eye-trace, 2D plane, 3D continuity) correspond exactly to what we commonly call “editing techniques” or “editing theory”: the relationship between eyeline and camera direction, match cuts, not “jumping” the camera, matching action, continuity cutting, and so on — all those academic theories you see in textbooks.

By contrast, the top three, the most important ones, have nothing to do with these technical requirements.

So what exactly does the most important one, emotion, refer to? An example makes it clear:

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot where, after a series of ups and downs, the protagonist is on a boat looking at the sea. This medium shot holds for a very long time.

Murch described 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 — narration.

Even in a film like Requiem for a Dream, with its “rabid, fragmented” editing style (the whole film has around 2,000 shots, while a typical 60–90 minute film usually has just 600–700), there are still long-held “long takes.” To keep the style consistent, the editor could theoretically have maintained high-speed cutting at all costs. Wouldn’t inserting a long shot disrupt the rhythm?

— The editor is clearly prioritizing the character’s emotion. True emotion can only be captured by a continuously rolling camera.

In fact, Murch’s rules for perfect editing apply not only to films but to all kinds of editing projects.

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

According to conventional academic theory, selecting footage is the first priority of editing. When picking shots you must follow general rules like “the shot should be stable, no shaking, the face should be clear, the framing should be perfectly composed…” But if you really want a piece to present its emotions accurately, you 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.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot holds for several seconds before the first line of dialogue (in standard practice, you’d very likely open directly on dialogue).

These are examples of using editing to preserve emotion.

So the pursuit of an excellent editor seems to be turning the question from “where do I cut?” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard the saying 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 script, flat as water, you’ll likely retain nothing and even start yawning. But if someone uses exaggerated facial expressions, body language, rises and falls in tone, spittle flying as they speak, then even if the story itself isn’t that great, it will still be engaging.

That’s why a good director can still make a mediocre script watchable: they know how to control rhythm — and that rhythm is driven by emotion.

If people who’ve seen a piece say it’s good, there must be something emotional in it that touched them. This is what people mean by “a good editor is a good storyteller.”

Back to what we said at the start: for an excellent editor, editing is definitely about arranging and combining “emotion.”

Using a series of shots to construct a montage sequence imbued with an “angry” emotional tone is perhaps not that difficult.

But suppose a feature-length film whose emotional themes include not only “anger” but also “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and so on. To mold all these emotional segments back 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 cut features, let alone films.

The reverse, however, does hold.

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

Stripping away some technical aspects, any good piece will always have a main emotional thread leading it, or several emotional threads interweaving.

Let’s say we’re editing a piece with the theme of “sadness.” In the bin there are two clips to choose from, both of someone sobbing:

Shot ① Properly filmed, technically flawless

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

From a technical standpoint, Shot ② is a “bad shot.”

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

For the editor, anything the camera captured — whether or not someone called “cut” — not a single second is “waste footage.”