Rule of six edit

Rule of Six — reel edit guide

Decide the cuts of a short-form video (reel / TikTok / Short) so every edit earns its place. The framework is Walter Murch's Rule of Six (from In the Blink of an Eye): not six rules, but a hierarchy of six criteria that ranks what makes an ideal cut. A perfect cut satisfies all six; when you can't have them all, the ones at the top win.

Where viral-video-script writes the words (the beat sheet → narration), this skill plans the montage — where, when and why to cut. Its outputs annotate the cuts of a reel this repo assembles with avatar-reel-composer (hard cuts at every scene boundary).

The hierarchy (six criteria, top = most important)

#	Criterion	Weight	The question the cut must answer
1	Emotion	51%	Does the cut convey / evoke the feeling the moment needs? Is this what the viewer will remember?
2	Story	23%	Does the cut advance the plot / develop character / clarify the theme — does it deliver new info?
3	Rhythm	10%	Is the cut at the right moment? Tempo, pacing, momentum, flow — does it feel satisfying (cut on the beat / the breath)?
4	Eye-trace	7%	Does it respect where the viewer's eye is? Is the point of interest carried to the same part of the frame across the cut?
5	2D plane of screen	5%	Photographic grammar: rule of thirds, eye-lines, the 180° line of action, screen direction.
6	3D space of action	4%	Spatial continuity: the real geography of where people / props are in the space.

Emotion + Story = 74%. Nail the top two and the cut mostly works; the bottom four are the details that make it invisible. Viewers forget a technically perfect, well-paced scene in months — they remember how it made them feel.

The one doctrine: sacrifice from the bottom up

An ideal cut satisfies all six. When it can't (they conflict), give them up from the bottom — 3D continuity first, then 2D grammar, then eye-trace, then rhythm — and never sacrifice emotion, almost never story.

• The bottom criteria break constantly and go unnoticed: a viewer can't easily gauge 3D space on a flat screen, so as long as continuity isn't egregiously bad they won't notice. Films break 2D grammar (eye-lines, the 180° line) on purpose to create unease or an emotional jolt.
• So: if a cut lands the emotion but "breaks" the line of action — take the cut. If a spatially perfect cut kills the feeling — throw it away.

North star: every cut is made to convey and evoke emotion. The way films move us is what makes them great; the rest is just the details we need to get there.

Why cuts work — and where to cut

A cut is a link between two focuses of attention. It works because it mirrors a blink: we blink when a thought is fully formed, to separate and punctuate one idea from the next. A shot is an idea; the cut is the blink that ends it. So the editor "blinks for the viewer" — cut where a thought completes, not mid-thought. In a reel that's the end of a complete idea / on the breath / at punctuation (exactly why avatar-reel-composer snaps every cut to a silence). Find that beat and the whole audience blinks together.

Placement heuristics that follow:

• Cut on the blink — at thought completion, never mid-idea. (#1/#3)
• Don't cut Dragnet-style — mechanically after every single line reads like a machine, not a mind; honor where thoughts actually end. (#3)
• Avoid the "2-yard jump" — never cut between two near-identical shots (it's jarring, like a beehive moved a few yards: too similar to reorient). Change the angle by ≥30° or the framing/zoom — this is the alternate-angle+zoom rule. (#4/#5)
• Juxtaposition makes meaning (the Kuleshov effect) — a B-roll placed next to a line creates a third meaning neither shot has alone; order the shots so the cut itself says what you mean. (#2)
• Split the edit (L/J cut) — let the soundtrack (the running voice, or a music phrase) spill across the picture cut; don't stop picture and sound on the same frame unless you want the jolt. (#1/#3)
• Let the music do the cut — open on an intro, hand off on an outro, pivot on a variation, and drop a hard beat on the punch; pick the track's section for the emotional job. (#1/#3)

Top-three are bound together (emotion + story + rhythm ≈ 84%): chase the emotion of a cut and it tends to pull the story and rhythm along. And getting the top items right obscures flaws in the lower ones — but never the reverse.

Sound & the cut — the soundtrack rides its own track

A cut is not one event on one track. Picture, voice and music are three separate streams, and where the soundtrack changes relative to the picture cut is itself an editing choice — one that lives up at Emotion (#1) and Rhythm (#3) (rhythm is "best exemplified by cutting to the beat of music"; emotion is the editor's north star and music is its strongest single lever). Beginners fight this: a timeline welds each clip's video+audio into one movable block, so they start and stop picture and sound on the same frame. Don't. Treat the tracks as independent elements that move on their own and only occasionally meet at a sync point — most of editing is that sleight of hand: change the picture while the soundtrack holds, or change the soundtrack while the picture holds, rarely both at once. That overlap is the split edit (J-cut: sound leads the picture; L-cut: sound lingers past it).

Look at the music, don't just listen. After choosing a track that carries the right feeling, read its structure (the waveform) and place the right section against the cut:

• Intro — crafted to ease a listener in → use it to open (a hook, a scene entrance).
• Outro / ending — a natural resolution → use it to hand off across a scene change.
• Variation / shift — a dynamic change mid-track (verse→chorus, quiet↔loud, visible in the waveform) → use it to pivot the emotion.

Three soundtrack-vs-cut moves (each is chosen for the feeling, so each serves #1/#3):

1. Gentle handoff (outro, offset from the cut) — start a musical resolution running before / through the picture cut. It "picks the viewer up in one scene and gently sets them down in the next." Music transition and picture cut deliberately do not land together — the score carries them over. (Film/TV's most common transition; listen for it in any score.)
2. Emotional shift (variation, on the cut) — land the frame where the music shifts exactly on the picture cut, so the same track carries into the next scene with a new feeling (lift or settle: fast→mellow, loud→quiet).
3. Hard-cut punch (intro beat, on the cut) — the exception where sound and picture do hit together: silence, then the music's first beat lands on the first frame of the new scene. Punchy, powerful, energetic — spend it on the one moment that earns it.

Source: Austen Menges, How a Pro Video Editor Uses Music — the working-editor's companion to Murch. The through-line is the same: pick the sound for the emotion, then let the tracks move independently so the cut feels invisible.

How it maps to a virtual-avatar reel

In this repo a reel is a chain of hard cuts at scene boundaries (talking-head ⇄ B-roll, angle/zoom changes). Treat every boundary as a cut and score it against the hierarchy:

• Emotion (1): does cutting here serve the feeling of the narration at this instant (a reveal, a punch, a breath of relief)? This is what picks the cut.
• Story (2): the cut should reveal new info — a new idea, a B-roll that shows what's being said, a reframe that re-focuses. If a shot delivers nothing new, let it hit the cutting-room floor (drop or shorten the scene).
• Rhythm (3): cut on the breath / beat, never let a shot linger. Mirrors the pacing rules avatar-reel-composer already enforces (hook ~2–3s, every shot ≤ ~6s, alternate angle+zoom on back-to-back talking-heads).
• Eye-trace (4): keep the subject's face / the point of interest in a consistent part of the 9:16 frame across a cut (talking-head → B-roll → back) so the eye doesn't hunt — this is what makes match cuts and montages glide.
• 2D plane (5): framing / rule-of-thirds / eye-line direction between angle crops; keep screen direction unless you're breaking it deliberately.
• 3D space (6): spatial continuity — least important for a talking-head reel; the first thing to sacrifice.
• Sound (the axis across #1/#3): our reel already runs one continuous narration that keeps talking across every B-roll / angle cut — a built-in split edit, so exploit it: cut the picture mid-thought over the running voice instead of resting picture and voice together at every sentence end. The music bed now follows a volume envelope when you give it a plan (finish_reel.py), so it does real editing work: mark in the cut sheet where each musical move belongs — an intro beat on the hook punch, a variation at the reel's emotional pivot, an outro under the CTA / close — and hand the cut sheet straight to the composer with finish_reel.py --music-from-cutsheet <slug>.cutsheet.json (it maps each cut's sound note to a move at that scene boundary), or author the precise finish.music_plan. SFX stingers + the golden flash already land on B-roll cuts (the punch move); keep those for the beats that earn them.

Inputs to gather (ask only what's missing)

Input	Needed for	Example
The reel's script / narration	the emotional + story spine	from viral-video-script
storyboard.json (optional)	seed one cut per scene boundary	avatar-reel-composer output
Emotional throughline	criterion #1 across the whole reel	"unease → recognition → relief"
Soundtrack / music	the sound axis (#1/#3)	narration voice-over (always) + optional music bed: mood + where it enters / shifts / resolves
Platform / length	rhythm budget	reels | tiktok | shorts, ~30s
Language	the notes' language	es | en (default: match the user)

If there's no storyboard yet, scaffold the cuts from scratch and hand the result back as the plan for building one.

Workflow

- [ ] 1. Gather inputs. If a storyboard.json exists, seed from it; else set cut count.
- [ ] 2. Scaffold the cut sheet JSON.
- [ ] 3. Fill every cut: emotion + story first, then rhythm/eye-trace/2D/3D. Mark sacrifices bottom-up.
- [ ] 4. Validate against the hierarchy. Fix every FAIL, weigh each WARN.
- [ ] 5. Render the edit sheet (.md) + director notes (.txt).
- [ ] 6. Hand off: build/adjust the storyboard, or use as an edit-review rubric.

Step 2 — scaffold (writes <out>/<slug>.cutsheet.json):

# from scratch (N cuts)
python3 .cursor/skills/rule-of-six-edit/scripts/scaffold.py my-reel \
  --cuts 6 --language es --out cuts_out/

# or seed one cut per scene boundary from a reel storyboard
python3 .cursor/skills/rule-of-six-edit/scripts/scaffold.py my-reel \
  --from-storyboard lolo/reels/001_my-reel/storyboard.json --language es --out cuts_out/

Step 3 — write. Edit the JSON. The hard rules the validator enforces:

• Every cut has a non-empty emotion (#1) and story (#2) — never TODO/blank.
• sacrifices never contains emotion or story, and is a valid bottom-up suffix: you may drop space_3d, then plane_2d, then eye_trace, then rhythm — in that order, no gaps (can't sacrifice eye-trace while keeping 3D).
• Each of the six criteria per cut is either addressed (a note) or listed in sacrifices — nothing left unconsidered.
• emotional_throughline is set (the feeling arc of the whole reel).

Optionally set a per-cut sound note (the soundtrack move — split vs hard sync, which music edit) and a top-level soundtrack intent (the music bed's mood + where it enters / shifts / resolves against the cuts). Neither is validated, but both flow into the edit sheet + director notes — and avatar-reel-composer's finish_reel.py --music-from-cutsheet <slug>.cutsheet.json reads the sound notes directly to build the music bed's volume envelope (entrance / lift / settle / duck / resolve at each cut). So the sound axis is now audible, not just advisory.

Step 4 — validate (re-run until no FAIL; treat WARN as review notes):

python3 .cursor/skills/rule-of-six-edit/scripts/check_cuts.py cuts_out/my-reel.cutsheet.json

Step 5 — render (writes <slug>.cutsheet.md + <slug>.cutnotes.txt next to the JSON):

python3 .cursor/skills/rule-of-six-edit/scripts/render_cuts.py cuts_out/my-reel.cutsheet.json

Writing each cut (per criterion)

Fill top-down; the top two decide the cut, the rest refine it.

• emotion (#1): the feeling this cut serves or evokes right now (e.g. "the turn from doubt to relief"). If you can't name it, the cut isn't motivated.
• story (#2): the new information the cut delivers (a reveal, a visual proof, a reframe). No new info → drop or shorten the shot.
• rhythm (#3): why here — on the breath / a comma / the beat; a pace note (keep it snappy, ≤ ~6s, hook ~2–3s).
• eye_trace (#4): where the eye is before and after; is the point of interest carried to the same region of the 9:16 frame?
• plane_2d (#5): framing / eye-line / 180° line / screen direction across the cut (or the intentional break).
• space_3d (#6): spatial continuity note (usually the first to sacrifice).
• sound (extra axis, not one of the six weighted criteria — serves #1/#3): the soundtrack move at this cut — a split (voice / music runs across the cut) vs a hard sync (beat on the frame); and which music edit if a bed is in play (handoff outro / variation shift / intro punch). Optional but high-leverage; leave blank for a pure picture cut.
• sacrifices: the criteria this cut deliberately gives up (bottom-up only).

Output files

<slug>.cutsheet.json  # the cut sheet (source of truth; edit this)
<slug>.cutsheet.md    # human edit sheet: per-cut criteria table, sacrifices, coverage score
<slug>.cutnotes.txt   # plain director notes per cut (keep/sacrifice) for whoever assembles/reviews

Handoff into this repo's pipeline

• Building a reel: use the filled cut sheet to write / adjust the avatar-reel-composer storyboard.json — set scene boundaries where a cut is emotionally + story-motivated, pick angle/zoom to honor eye-trace + 2D, and keep the rhythm (short hook, no lingering shots). Then compose:

  python3 .cursor/skills/avatar-reel-composer/scripts/compose_reel.py storyboard.json --finish
  

• Reviewing an edit: run it as a rubric — score each existing cut and flag any that lead with 3D/2D correctness at the expense of emotion or story. Two review laws from Murch: judge only what's on screen (not your intent or effort — what will the viewer actually see?), and when a cut feels wrong the cause is usually upstream — a setup the viewer needed was missing earlier, so fix the setup instead of deleting the flagged shot.

For the words that ride over these cuts, see viral-video-script. For the cutaways a Story-beat calls for, see broll-generator / broll-finder. For the music bed the sound axis plans, see bg-music-hq and avatar-reel-composer — its finish_reel.py turns this cut sheet's sound/soundtrack into the bed's volume envelope (--music-from-cutsheet, finish.music_plan, or --music-structure auto).

Anti-patterns

1. Cutting for correctness, not feeling — a spatially perfect cut that kills the emotion. Emotion is 51%; take the emotional cut. (#1)
2. Keeping a shot that adds nothing — every cut must deliver new info; let dead footage hit the cutting-room floor. (#2)
3. Lingering / no cuts — a shot that overstays kills rhythm and attention. (#3)
4. Sacrificing from the top — never give up emotion; almost never story. Give up 3D/2D first. (doctrine)
5. Making the eye hunt — the subject jumps across the frame at a cut, adding friction the viewer feels but can't name. (#4)
6. Treating the 180° line as sacred — it's a low-priority rule you may break on purpose for unease; just don't break it by accident. (#5)
7. Cutting mid-thought / Dragnet-style — cutting mechanically or in the middle of an idea instead of on the blink (where the thought completes). (#3)
8. The 2-yard jump — cutting between two near-identical shots; change the angle ≥30° or the framing/zoom so the eye reorients. (#4/#5)
9. The beginner's block — welding sound to picture — starting/stopping the voice or music on the same frame as every picture cut. Use split edits: let the soundtrack run across the cut, meeting the picture only where you mean it. (#1/#3)
10. Wallpaper music — a bed that just plays under everything, doing no editing work. Choose the track's section and mark where it enters / shifts / resolves against the cuts (intro on the hook, variation on the pivot, outro on the close). (#1/#3)

Additional resources

• The psychology / craft behind each criterion + Murch's reasoning: reference.md
• Full worked cut sheets (EN + ES): examples.md