The Key Element to Editing a Good Film: “Emotion”

When faced with the same batch 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 we’ll 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 continuity of space (4%)

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

Look at the weights of the six rules:

The last three, which are considered the least important (eye-trace | two-dimensional plane | three-dimensional continuity), are exactly what we usually call “editing technique” or “editing theory”: things like the relationship between eye direction and camera direction, match cuts, avoiding jump cuts, continuity of movement, and so on—the kind of academic theories you find in textbooks.

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

So what exactly does the top-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 twists and turns in the protagonist’s life, he 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 drifting on with the sea, that’s how long the shot can hold.”

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

Take Requiem for a Dream, which uses a “rabid, fragmented” editing style (the film has around 2,000 shots, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film usually has 600–700 shots). Even there, you still find “long takes” that hold for quite a while. To maintain the overall style, the editor could have simply kept a relentless high-speed cutting pace. Wouldn’t inserting a long-held shot ruin the rhythm?

—Yet the editor clearly chose to prioritize the characters’ emotions. Genuine emotion can only be captured by a camera that keeps rolling.

In fact, Walter Murch’s perfect editing rules apply not only to feature films but to every type of editing project.

We often focus too much on “technique” and neglect the most primal “emotion” communicated to the audience through the shot.

According to rigid academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and it must follow general principles like “the shot must be stable, no shake; the face must be clearly visible; the composition must be perfectly framed,” and so on. But if we truly want a film’s emotions to be accurately conveyed, we often must break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, when the protagonist exits frame, he accidentally bumps into the camera, causing the image to shake, but the editor deliberately chose not to cut it out.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot holds for several seconds before the first line of dialogue appears (whereas by conventional editing standards, it would very likely open with immediate dialogue).

These are all examples of using editing to preserve emotion.

So it seems that what excellent editors pursue is changing the question “where to cut” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard the saying that good editing is about storytelling—telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook—flat, colorless, like plain water—you’re unlikely to remember it, and may even start yawning. But if someone tells the same story with exaggerated facial expressions, body movements, and a dynamic, rising-and-falling voice, spitting as they speak, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it will still be captivating.

This is why a good director can still make a thoroughly mediocre script into a basically decent film: because they know how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If people who’ve seen a film say it’s good, then there must be something emotionally resonant that touched them. This is what we’ve been repeating above: “a good editor is always a storyteller.”

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

Using a set of shots to create a montage sequence that conveys a feeling of “anger” is relatively easy.

But imagine a feature-length film whose emotional palette is not only “anger,” but also includes segments of “joy,” “sadness,” “pleasure,” and so on. Weaving these different emotional threads into a single cohesive work is extremely difficult.

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

This is why being good at editing short videos does not mean you can edit features, let alone movies.

The reverse, however, can be true.

That’s also why, to truly learn editing well, you must start from film theory.

Stripping away some of the technical aspects, any good film will definitely have one emotional throughline leading the way, or several emotional throughlines intertwined.

Suppose we’re editing a film whose theme is “sadness,” and there are two shots in the bin to choose from—both are of a person sobbing:

Shot ①: Properly filmed, technically flawless.

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

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

But if we want the film to be good, we still have to choose Shot ②.

As long as the camera has recorded it, regardless of whether “cut” was called or not, from the perspective of editing, there is no such thing as a single “wasted second” of footage.