Is film editing intuitive or planned?

Editing lives in both worlds at once, and separating them is a false problem. The planning happens before you sit down: the goal, the intention, the clarity about what you want to say. That is the structural skeleton. But in the moment of the cut, something else takes over. The intuition is not random, it is conditioned. Years of watching, feeling, and refining mean that what feels instinctive is actually deeply trained judgment.

Think of it this way: editing is the art of removing everything that isn't the point. The plan tells you what the point is. The intuition tells you when you've arrived there.

Trust the gut, but know why it earned that trust.