Walter Murch's The Rule of Six: What is the perfect cut from one shot to another?

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine what makes a perfect cut from one shot to another in a film. This study was based on a set of rules the American sound designer and editor Walter Murch conducted in his book In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, called The Rule of Six. This study was also done through conducting a literature review of existing writings on the topic of editing with an application of some of the rules to a scene from the film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) about the rock band Queen – the scene when Queen meets their potential manager. This particular scene is renowned to be a good example of bad editing, which is why I chose to examine what exactly makes the scene so badly edited. Murch’s six rules on editing consist of Emotion, Story, Rhythm, Eye trace, Two-dimensional Plane of Screen, and Three-dimensional Space of Action, which all have different values in order of importance for the cut. The findings in this paper suggest that what makes a perfect cut from one shot to another is when the cut conveys the right emotion of the moment in the scene, advances the story in a meaningful way, is built up by a rhythmically interesting and right pace, respects planarity and eye trace, and preserves three-dimensional continuity. This is however not always possible in one cut, as to why emotion should always be the top priority when making a cut, as it is valued with over 50% by Murch. An editor should make their way up the list of points in the event of problems in preserving all the six criteria in the same cut, as problems in the lower order items are usually not noticed by the audience if the emotion is right.