The 2026 showreel started as roughly eleven minutes of raw footage across a year of projects. The final cut is sixty seconds. Almost everything in that gap is a pacing decision, not a footage-quality one.
Structure before shots
I block the cut in three beats before touching a single clip: an opening hook under three seconds, a rising-density middle where cut length shortens roughly every four shots, and a closing hold — one shot given noticeably more time than anything before it, so the eye has somewhere to land.
Sound drives the cut, not the other way around
Once the beat map is in place, transients in the score — not the visuals — decide where hard cuts land. A cut that lands a frame early or late against a kick drum reads as "off" even to viewers who couldn't tell you why.
The rule I keep breaking (on purpose)
Conventional wisdom says never hold a shot longer than the previous one during the rising-density section. I broke it once, deliberately, right before the final beat — a half-second hold that reads as a breath before the ending. Rules earn their keep by being breakable exactly once.