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

Given the same raw 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, 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 screen (5%)

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

These are 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 plane | three-dimensional continuity), are exactly what we usually call “editing technique” or “editing theory”: the relationship between eye-line and camera direction, hard cuts, avoiding jump cuts, match cuts, action continuity, and so on—all those textbook academic theories.

By contrast, the top three most important ones are actually unrelated to these technical requirements.

So what exactly does the most important one—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 twists and turns in his life, the protagonist sits on a boat looking at the sea; this medium shot holds for a very long time.

Editor Walter Murch explained his thinking when cutting this shot:

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

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

Even in a film with a “rabid, fragmentary” editing style like Requiem for a Dream (which broke records with around 2,000 shots; normally a 60–90 minute film has only 600–700), there is no shortage of “long takes” that linger. To maintain a consistent style, the editor could have chosen to keep everything fast-paced. Wouldn’t inserting a long, lingering shot break the rhythm?

—The editor is prioritizing the character’s emotions above all else. Genuine emotion can only be captured by a continuously rolling camera.

In fact, Walter Murch’s rules for perfect editing are not only applicable to films; they apply to editing of any project.

We often focus too much on “technique” and ignore the most primal “emotion” that the footage communicates to the audience.

According to proper academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and selecting footage must follow general principles like “the shot must be stable, no camera shake, the face needs to be clear, the framing must be perfect,” and so on. Yet if we truly want a film’s emotions to be accurately presented, we often must break those rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, when the protagonist exits the 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 lingers for several seconds before the dialogue begins (according to common editing practice, it would very likely have started directly on the dialogue).

These are all examples of preserving emotion through editing.

So it seems an excellent editor’s pursuit is to transform the question “where do we cut?” into “what if we don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard this: good editing is storytelling—telling stories with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook, flat as water and completely monotonous, you’re unlikely to remember anything, and you might even start yawning. But if someone uses exaggerated facial expressions, body language, dynamic pacing, and even sprays spit while telling a story, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it will still be engaging.

That’s why a good director can still make an extremely mediocre script into a not-too-bad film, because they understand how to control rhythm—and that rhythm is driven by emotion.

If someone watches a piece and says it’s good, then something in it has definitely touched them emotionally. This is what I’ve been repeating above: “a good editor is always telling a story.”

Back to the point at the beginning: for an excellent editor, editing is about arranging and combining emotions.

Creating a montage sequence that conveys “anger” from a set of shots might be relatively easy.

But in a feature film, the emotional themes are not limited to “anger.” There may be segments of “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and so on. To blend these emotions back together into a unified 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 editing short videos does not necessarily mean you can edit long-form work, much less a feature film.

The reverse, however, does hold.

This is also why learning editing well must start from film theory.

Setting aside some technical aspects, a good film always has one emotional throughline leading it, or several emotional throughlines intertwined.

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

Shot ① Filmed normally, technically flawless.

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

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

But if we want the piece to work emotionally, we still have to choose Shot ②.

Anything captured by the camera—whether or not “cut” was called—contains no such thing as “wasted footage” in the editing room.