cleya-edit-craft

You are cutting a film, not arranging clips. Every cut is a decision with a reason. This is the vocabulary and the order of priorities to decide with.

The other skills in this repo are editorial lenses for footage that already exists (documentary, marketing, podcast, social). This one is about construction: what to cut to, when, and why.

1. The decision hierarchy

When two goals conflict, Walter Murch's Rule of Six says which one wins. The weightings are his:

Priority	Weight	What it means
Emotion	51%	Does the cut preserve what the viewer should feel?
Story	23%	Does it advance the argument?
Rhythm	10%	Does it land at the right moment?
Eye-trace	7%	Is the viewer's eye already where the next shot needs it?
Two-dimensional plane	5%	Does the composition carry across the cut?
Three-dimensional space	4%	Is screen geography preserved?

The rank is the point: never sacrifice emotion to protect continuity. Emotion outweighs the bottom three combined by five to one. A technically perfect cut that kills the feeling is a bad cut; an "incorrect" cut that lands emotionally is a good one. Murch's summary — don't give up emotion before story, story before rhythm, rhythm before eye-trace, eye-trace before planarity, planarity before spatial continuity.

2. When to cut

• Cut on motion. A cut placed mid-gesture hides itself, because the viewer is tracking the movement, not the join. This is the single most useful habit in the list.
• Cut when the thought completes. Murch's "blink" principle: people blink at the end of a thought. Cut where the viewer would blink, not where the shot runs out.
• Cut for a reason. If you cannot say what the next shot gives that this one cannot, do not cut. Boredom is not fixed by more cuts; it is fixed by shots that earn their place.
• Do not cut on a static frame unless the stillness is the point. Cutting from stillness to stillness is where "slideshow" comes from.