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

When faced with the same raw footage, for an excellent editor, editing is not simply 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.

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

Looking at the weight of these six rules:

The three least important ones (eye-trace | two-dimensional plane | three-dimensional continuity) are exactly what we usually refer to as “editing techniques” or “editing theory”: for example, the relationship between eye-line and camera direction, hard cuts, avoiding jump cuts, match cuts, action continuity editing, and so on—the academic theories you see in textbooks.

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

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

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there’s a shot where, after a series of ups and downs in his life, the protagonist is on a boat looking out at the sea. This medium shot lingers for a long time.

Editor Walter Murch explained 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. And that is the most important function of editing—narration.

Even in the “rapid-fire, fragmented” editing style of Requiem for a Dream (which has around 2,000 shots in total, while a typical 60–90 minute film usually has only 600–700 shots), there are still plenty of long-held “long takes.” To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have ignored everything to keep cutting at high speed. Wouldn’t inserting these long-held shots ruin the rhythm?

— The editor is absolutely prioritizing the characters’ emotions. Genuine emotion can only be captured by a camera that keeps rolling.

In fact, Walter Murch’s “perfect editing” rules don’t apply only to films; they apply to the editing of any project.

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

According to rigid academic theory, selecting footage is the primary task of editing. In selecting footage, you must follow general rules like “steady shots, no shake; faces clearly visible; perfectly correct composition…” Yet if you really want the emotional content of a film to come through 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 camera holds on the shot for several seconds before any dialogue begins (whereas under normal editing conventions, the film would likely open directly on dialogue).

These are all ways of preserving emotion through editing.

So it seems that what great editors pursue is turning “where to cut” into “what if I don’t cut?”

You’ve surely heard the saying that good editing is about telling a story—telling a story with shots. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook, flat and monotonous like plain water, you probably won’t remember it at all, and might even start yawning. But if someone tells a story with exaggerated facial expressions, big gestures, dramatic ups and downs in tone, spitting as they talk, then even if the story itself is mediocre, it will still be engaging.

That’s why a good director can still shoot a terrible script into something not too bad—because they understand how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If people who’ve watched a film say it’s good, then something in it must have moved them emotionally. That’s what I’ve been repeating above: “Good editors know how to tell a story.”

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

Using a set of shots to build a montage sequence with a clear emotional tone—say “anger”—may not be hard.

But suppose you’re editing a feature-length film: its emotional themes are not only “anger,” but also segments of “joy,” “sadness,” “pleasure,” and so on. To blend all these emotional segments back together into one coherent 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 cutting short videos doesn’t mean you can cut features, let alone feature films.

The reverse, however, does hold true.

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

Stripping away some technical aspects, a good film always has at least one main emotional throughline driving it forward, or several emotional throughlines interweaving with one another.

Let’s say you’re editing a film whose theme is “sadness.” In the bin there are two takes you can choose from, both of a person sobbing:

Shot ①: Normal shooting, technically flawless.

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

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

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

As long as the camera has recorded it, whether or not someone called “cut,” in the edit suite, there is no such thing as a “wasted second” of footage.