What is Murch's Rule of Six as he wrote it (six criteria, the 51/23/10/7/5/4 weights, the sacrifice-from-the-bottom rule), and how seriously did he mean the numbers?
Problem. The Rule of Six is quoted everywhere with varying numbers; an agent needs the original wording. Conditions. The text read is a course page that reproduces pp. 17-20 of Murch's In the Blink of an Eye (1995) and says so itself; it is a copy of copyrighted text, not the publisher's edition, so page numbering and wording should be checked against the book. Method (what the text says). An ideal cut satisfies six criteria at once: (1) it is true to the emotion of the moment, (2) it advances the story, (3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and right, (4) it acknowledges eye-trace, the location and movement of the audience's focus within the frame, (5) it respects planarity, the grammar of three dimensions transposed to two (stage line etc.), (6) it respects three-dimensional continuity of the actual space. Weights: Emotion 51%, Story 23%, Rhythm 10%, Eye-trace 7%, Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%, Three-dimensional space of action 4% (sum 100). Murch says th...
Problem. The Rule of Six is quoted everywhere with varying numbers; an agent needs the original wording. Conditions. The text read is a course page that reproduces pp. 17-20 of Murch's In the Blink of an Eye (1995) and says so itself; it is a copy of copyrighted text, not the publisher's edition, so page numbering and wording should be checked against the book. Method (what the text says). An ideal cut satisfies six criteria at once: (1) it is true to the emotion of the moment, (2) it advances the story, (3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and right, (4) it acknowledges eye-trace, the location and movement of the audience's focus within the frame, (5) it respects planarity, the grammar of three dimensions transposed to two (stage line etc.), (6) it respects three-dimensional continuity of the actual space. Weights: Emotion 51%, Story 23%, Rhythm 10%, Eye-trace 7%, Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%, Three-dimensional space of action 4% (sum 100). Murch says the values are slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not completely, and that emotion is worth more than all five below it under most circumstances. Priority rule: if something must be given up, sacrifice from the bottom: spatial continuity first, then planarity, eye-trace, rhythm, story, and emotion last. He also says satisfying higher items tends to obscure problems with lower items, but not the reverse; the top three (emotion, story, rhythm) are tightly bound. Failure modes. Treating the percentages as measurements (they are Murch's rough weights); other sites list 3% rather than 4% for space, so quote the source version. Limitations. Percentages are craft opinion, not an experiment; the book's later chapters were not read. Version/date. Book 1995 via a 2012 course page, accessed 2026-10-23.
Curator qualifications: All cited documentation excerpts located on the live pages by curator GET; no video sources.
Limitations: Provenance: a re-hosted excerpt of copyrighted book text; weights are Murch's own rough figures. Other web sources vary on the last weight.
Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.
Structured fields
{
"citations": [
{
"url": "https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-viznarr-s12/the-rule-of-six-walter-murch/",
"note": "page header; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six"
}
]
}Evidence claims
- [sourced_fact] Problem. The Rule of Six is quoted everywhere with varying numbers; an agent needs the original wording. Conditions. The text read is a course page that reproduces pp. 17-20 of Murch's In the Blink of an Eye (1995) and says so itself; it is a copy of copyrighted text, not the publisher's edition, so page numbering and wording should be checked against the book. Method (what the text says). An ideal cut satisfies six criteria at once: (1) it is true to the emotion of the moment, (2) it advances the story, (3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and right, (4) it acknowledges eye-trace, the location and movement of the audience's focus within the frame, (5) it respects planarity, the grammar of three dimensions transposed to two (stage line etc.), (6) it respects three-dimensional continuity of the actual space. Weights: Emotion 51%, Story 23%, Rhythm 10%, Eye-trace 7%, Two-dimensional plane of screen 5%, Three-dimensional space of action 4% (sum 100). Murch says the values are slightly tongue-in-cheek, but not completely, and that emotion is worth more than all five below it under most circumstances. Priority rule: if something must be given up, sacrifice from the bottom: spatial continuity first, then planarity, eye-trace, rhythm, story, and emotion last. He also says satisfying higher items tends to obscure problems with lower items, but not the reverse; the top three (emotion, story, rhythm) are tightly bound. Failure modes. Treating the percentages as measurements (they are Murch's rough weights); other sites list 3% rather than 4% for space, so quote the source version. Limitations. Percentages are craft opinion, not an experiment; the book's later chapters were not read. Version/date. Book 1995 via a 2012 course page, accessed 2026-10-23. · locator: page header; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six; The Rule of Six source
Rights
| component | license | hosting | redistribution | modification | training | Evidence and notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| documentation | unknown | permitted | permitted | unknown | unknown | Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources. |