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

Given the same raw footage, for an excellent editor, editing is never just arranging shots; it’s arranging “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.

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 of action (4%)

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

Look at the proportions of these six rules:

The last three, which are the least important (eye-trace | 2D characteristics | 3D continuity), are exactly what we usually call “editing technique” or “editing theory”: things like the relationship between eye-line direction and camera direction, match cuts, avoiding jump cuts, continuity of movement, and so on—the whole set of academic theories found in textbooks.

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

So what exactly does the top-ranked, most important “emotion” refer to? One example makes 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 on a boat. This medium shot lingers for a long time.

Editor Walter Murch described his thinking when cutting this shot:

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

That is emotion. That is the most important function of editing: narrative.

For example, even in a “rabid, fragmented” editing style like Requiem for a Dream (which breaks records with about 2,000 shots in the whole film, while a typical 60–90 minute film only has 600–700), there are still plenty of long takes that linger. To maintain the style, the editor could have insisted on a relentlessly fast cutting pace. Wouldn’t inserting long-held shots destroy the rhythm?

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

In fact, Murch’s “Rule of Six” for perfect editing doesn’t just apply to films; it applies to the editing of any project.

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

According to traditional academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and it must follow general principles such as “the shot must be stable, no shaking, the face must be clearly visible, the composition perfectly balanced,” and so on. Yet if you truly want a film’s emotions to be conveyed accurately, you must often break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, the actor accidentally bumps into the camera when exiting the frame, causing the image to shake, but the editor deliberately left it in.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the camera lingers for several seconds before any dialogue begins (according to usual editing practice, it would very likely start directly with dialogue).

These are all ways of preserving emotion through editing.

So, the pursuit of an excellent editor seems to be changing the question from “Where do I cut?” to “What if I don’t cut?”

You’ve likely heard the saying that good editing tells a story—it tells a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook, flat and monotone like plain water, you probably won’t remember it and may even start yawning. But if someone tells a story with exaggerated facial expressions, body language, rising and falling intonation, spit flying everywhere, then even if the story itself isn’t that great, it will still be compelling.

This is why a good director can still make a mediocre script watchable—because they know how to control rhythm, and that rhythm is driven by emotion.

If someone says a film is good after watching it, it must have something emotional in it that moved them. That’s the “good editors are storytellers” idea we have been repeating above.

Back to the opening statement: “For an excellent editor, editing is definitely about arranging ‘emotion.’”

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

But for a feature-length film, its emotional palette is not limited to “anger.” It may also contain “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and many other segments. To weave all these emotions together into a coherent work is extremely difficult.

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

This is why being good at cutting short videos does not mean you can cut features—or films.

The reverse, however, often holds true.

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

Setting aside some technical aspects, any good film is always driven by an emotional throughline—or several emotional throughlines that intertwine.

Suppose we are editing a film with “sadness” as its theme, and there are two takes of a crying scene in the bin:

Shot ① Normal recording, technically perfect.

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

From a technical viewpoint, Shot ② is a so-called “bad take.”

But if you want the film to be good, you should still choose Shot ②.

Anything captured by the camera—regardless of whether “cut” has been called—contains no “wasted” seconds in the editing room.