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

When facing the same batch of footage, for an excellent editor, editing is never just arranging and combining shots; it is arranging and combining emotions.

In previous videos/articles I’ve mentioned more than once the “Six Rules of Perfect Editing.” Today we’ll 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 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 the “Bible” of editing.

Look at the weight given to each rule:

The last three, the least important ones (eye-trace | 2D plane | 3D continuity), are precisely what we usually mean by “editing technique” and “editing theory”: the relationship between eye direction and camera direction, match cuts, not jumping the axis, matching action, continuity cutting, and a whole range of textbook, academic theories.

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

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

There is a shot in The Talented Mr. Ripley: 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.

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—narration.

Take Requiem for a Dream, which uses an extremely “fragmented, rapid-fire” editing style (around 2,000 shots in the whole film, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film usually has only 600–700 shots). It still contains quite a few “long takes” that hold for a long time. To maintain its style, the editor could have kept cutting rapidly no matter what. Wouldn’t inserting long-held shots “ruin” the rhythm?

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

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

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

According to strict academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and the 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 correct”… But if we truly want the emotional content of a piece to land, we 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 did not cut it out.

In the opening of 12 Years a Slave, the shot lingers for several seconds before the dialogue starts (whereas a typical editing approach would be to begin with dialogue right away).

These are all ways of using editing to preserve emotion.

So it seems that what a great editor seeks is to turn the question “Where do I cut?” into “What if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard that good editing is storytelling—telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story in a flat tone like reading a textbook, dull as plain water, you’ll likely forget it immediately, maybe even start yawning. But if someone tells the same story with exaggerated facial expressions, body language, rising and falling pitch, spitting as they speak, then even if the story itself isn’t that great, it will still be engaging.

This is why a good director can still make a so-so script watchable—because they know how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is governed by emotion.

If someone says a film is good after watching it, it must be that something emotional in it moved them. This is what we keep repeating above: “A good editor is always telling a story.”

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

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

But in a feature film, the emotional palette doesn’t only include “anger.” There may also be sections of “joy,” “sorrow,” “delight,” and so on. To weave all these emotions together into a coherent work is extremely difficult.

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

This is why being good at cutting short videos doesn’t mean you can cut features, much less feature films.

The reverse, however, does hold true.

This is also why, to truly learn editing well, you need to start with film theory.

Once you strip away some technical aspects, any good piece always has one emotional through-line pulling it along, or several emotional through-lines intertwining.

Suppose we’re editing a film whose core theme is “sadness.” In the bin there are two shots of someone crying that we need to choose from:

Shot ①: Normally filmed, technically flawless.

Shot ②: Out of focus, shaky, but the person is crying more intensely and with deeper feeling.

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

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

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