The quiet win of the b-roll cut

Spent two hours today reordering a sequence of city shots—empty park benches, steam rising from a manhole, a dog sniffing a fire hydrant—nothing dramatic. But when I finally landed on the rhythm, it felt like breathing after holding it too long. There’s something holy in the way light hits pavement at 5:17 a.m., and I kept that shot just because it made me pause. Not for the story, not for the edit, but because I remembered why I started.