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

When faced with the same 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.

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%)

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

Look at the weighting of these six rules:

The last three, which are the least important (eye-trace, 2D characteristics, 3D continuity), are exactly what we commonly call “editing technique” and “editing theory”: things like the relationship between eyeline direction and camera direction, hard cuts, no jump cuts, match cuts, action continuity cutting, and so on—academy-style theories you find in textbooks.

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

So what exactly does “emotion,” which ranks first and is the most important, refer to? One example makes it clear:

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot after the protagonist has gone through a series of ups and downs in his life. He’s on a boat looking out at the sea, and 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 drifting 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 like Requiem for a Dream, with its “rabid, fragmented” editing style (the whole film has around 2,000 shots, while a typical 60–90 minute film has only 600–700), there are still plenty of long takes that hold for a long time. To keep the style consistent throughout, the editor could have simply maintained high-speed cutting at all costs. Wouldn’t inserting long-held shots disrupt the rhythm?

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

In fact, Murch’s perfect editing rules don’t apply only to films; they’re applicable to editing of all kinds of projects.

We’re often too focused on “technique” and overlook the most primal “emotions” that a shot conveys to the audience.

According to conventional academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and you must follow universal principles when choosing shots: “The camera must be steady, no shaking; faces must be clearly visible; composition must be perfectly proper…” and so on. Yet if you really want a film’s emotion to be expressed accurately, you often have to break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, the lead exits frame and accidentally bumps the camera, causing the image to shake, yet the editor deliberately kept the shot.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, several seconds pass before any dialogue appears (whereas in typical editing practice, the opening would very likely go straight into dialogue).

These are all examples of using editing to preserve emotion.

So, what an excellent editor pursues is less “where to cut” and more “what if we don’t cut?”

You’ve probably all heard that good editing is about telling stories—telling stories with images. But how do you tell a story well? If someone recites it like reading from a script, flat as water, you’ll remember almost nothing and probably start yawning. But if someone tells it with expressive facial expressions, exaggerated body language, dramatic rises and falls in their voice, even spraying saliva as they speak, then even a mediocre story can be quite engaging.

This is why a good director can still make something decent out of an utterly mediocre script—because they understand how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If people who’ve seen a film say it’s good, there must be something on an emotional level that touched them. That’s what’s meant above by “good editors are all storytellers.”

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

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

But imagine a feature film whose emotional themes are not just “anger,” but also include segments of “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and so on. To merge and shape all these emotional segments back into one cohesive 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 necessarily mean you can edit features, much less movies.

The other way around, however, does hold true.

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

Stripping away some of the technical aspects, any good film is always led by an emotional throughline—or by several emotional throughlines intertwined together.

Let’s say we’re editing a film with the theme of “sadness.” Now there are two clips in the bin we have to choose from, both of a person crying bitterly:

Shot ① Normally filmed, technically flawless.

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

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

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

As long as the camera has recorded it—regardless of whether “cut” was called—there is not a single second of “wasted footage” from the editor’s perspective.