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

Given the same raw footage, for an excellent editor, editing is definitely not just 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 we’ll 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 were proposed by the famous editor Walter Murch (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) and are regarded as a kind of editing “bible.”

Look at the weight of each of these six rules:

The last three, the least important (eye trace | two-dimensional plane | three-dimensional continuity), are exactly what we usually refer to as “editing technique” and “editing theory”: for example, the relationship between eyeline and camera direction; match cuts; avoiding jump cuts; matching on action; and so on—the whole set of academic theories you see in textbooks.

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

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

In the film The Talented Mr. Ripley, there is a shot where, after a series of twists in the protagonist’s life, he stands 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 along with the sea, that’s how long you can hold the shot.”

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

Even in a “rabid, fragmented” editing style like Requiem for a Dream (the film has a record-breaking ~2,000 shots, whereas a typical 60–90 minute film only has 600–700 shots), there are still “long takes” that linger. To maintain the style throughout, the editor could have insisted on high-speed cutting no matter what. Wouldn’t inserting a shot that holds for a long time ruin the rhythm?

—The editor is very clearly prioritizing the character’s emotion. Real emotion can only be captured by a camera that keeps rolling.

In fact, Walter Murch’s rules for perfect editing don’t just apply to films; they apply to editing any kind of project.

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

According to orthodox academic theory, selecting footage is the editor’s primary task, and that selection must follow the “standard rules”: “the shot must be stable, no shake; the face must be clear; composition must be perfectly proper…” and so on. But often, if you truly want a film’s emotion to be accurately conveyed, you must break these rules.

In this scene from The Godfather, when the protagonist exits frame, he accidentally bumps the camera, causing it to shake—but the editor deliberately kept it.

At the beginning of 12 Years a Slave, the shot holds for a few seconds before the dialogue starts (according to normal editing practice, the film would very likely begin with dialogue immediately).

These are all cases of preserving emotion through editing.

So, it seems that what a great editor pursues is turning “Where should I cut?” into “What if I don’t cut?”

You’ve probably heard the saying that good editing is about telling a story—telling a story with images. How do you tell a story well? If someone recites a story like reading from a textbook, in a flat, monotonous way, you’ll probably have no impression of it at all and might even start yawning. But if someone uses vivid facial expressions, big gestures, dramatic pacing, and spits flying everywhere while telling the same story, even if the story itself isn’t that great, it will still be engaging enough.

That’s why a good director can still shoot a thoroughly mediocre script into something passable—because they know how to control rhythm. And that rhythm is controlled by emotion.

If people who have watched a film say it’s good, there must have been something emotional in it that moved them. This is exactly what was being repeated above: “Good editors are good storytellers.”

Back to what we said at the start: for an excellent editor, editing is definitely arranging and combining emotion.

Using a sequence of shots to construct a montage full of “anger” might be easy.

But in a feature-length film, the emotional themes are never just “anger”—maybe there are segments of “joy,” “sadness,” “delight,” and so on. To blend all those emotions back together into a single work is extremely difficult.

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

This is why being good at cutting short videos does not mean you can necessarily edit long-form content, let alone feature films.

The reverse, however, often holds true.

This is also why, if you want to truly learn editing, you have to start from film theory.

Leaving aside some technical aspects, a good piece always has at least one emotional throughline pulling everything along—or several emotional throughlines interwoven together.

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

Shot ①: Normal recording, no flaws in the shot.

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

From a technical standpoint, Shot ② is what would be called a “bad shot.”

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

Anything the camera has captured—whether or not “cut” was called—contains not a single “wasted shot” in the edit bay.