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

When faced with the same set of footage, for a truly good 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 unpack them in detail.

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

Look at the weight each of these six rules carries:

The three least important ones (eye-trace | two-dimensionality | three-dimensional continuity) are exactly what we usually refer to as “editing techniques” or “editing theory”: things like the relationship between eye-line direction and camera direction, hard cuts, not “jumping” the camera, match cuts, action continuity editing and so on—a whole series of academic theories from textbooks.

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

So what exactly does the top priority, emotion, refer to? One example makes it very clear:

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot where, after a series of ups and downs in the protagonist’s life, he stands on a boat looking 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 with the sea, that’s how long you can hold the shot.”

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

For instance, even in the “mad-dog, fragmentary” editing style of Requiem for a Dream (which broke records with around 2,000 shots for the whole film, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film only has about 600–700 shots), there are still plenty of long takes that linger. To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have chosen to stick to high-speed cutting at all costs—wouldn’t inserting long, lingering shots ruin the rhythm?

— The editor is prioritizing the characters’ emotions above all else. Real emotion can only be captured by a camera that just keeps rolling.

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

We often focus too much on “technique” and neglect the primal “emotion” that the footage conveys to the audience.

According to orthodox academic theory, the primary goal of editing is to select footage, and selection must follow general principles like: “the shot must be stable, no shaking, the face must be clearly visible, the composition must be proper and upright…” But if you truly want the emotional content of a piece to be accurately presented, you inevitably have to break those rules.

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

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot lingers for several seconds before the dialogue starts (whereas standard editing practice would most likely have the dialogue start right at the beginning).

All of these are ways of preserving emotion through editing.

So, what great editors seem to strive for is turning the question in editing from “Where do I 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 it like reading a textbook, flat as water from start to finish, you’re unlikely to remember it and might even start yawning. But if someone tells a story with exaggerated facial expressions, big gestures, dynamic pacing, spraying spit everywhere, then even if the story itself isn’t great, it will still be engaging enough.

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 governed by emotion.

If someone watches a film and says it’s good, then there must be something emotional in it that moved them. That’s what I’ve been repeating above: “A good editor is always telling a story.”

Back to what we said at the beginning: “For a truly good editor, editing is definitely about arranging and combining emotions.”

Using a series of shots to create a montage passage that expresses “anger” is relatively easy.

But suppose a feature-length film contains not only “anger” as an emotional theme, but also segments of “joy,” “sorrow,” “happiness,” and so on. To blend all these emotions into a single cohesive work is extremely difficult.

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

This is why being good at editing short videos does not necessarily mean you can edit long-form content, much less films.

The reverse, however, does hold true.

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

Putting aside some of the technical aspects, any good film will have at least one emotional throughline pulling the audience along, or several emotional throughlines interweaving.

Let’s say we’re editing a film with “sadness” as its main theme, and there are two pieces of footage in the bin showing someone sobbing:

Shot ①: A normal take, technically flawless. Shot ②: Out of focus and shaky, but the crying is much more heartfelt.

From a technical standpoint, shot ② is so-called “bad footage.”

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

For the editor, anything captured by the camera—whether or not someone has called “cut”—contains no such thing as a “wasted shot.”