Writers write.

Today's blog is inspired by a question from "Anonymous".  I don't know how long the question was there unanswered because it had fallen into my spam folder, probably for mentioning another blogging platform.  Anyway, part of the question was, in part, "Any advice for aspiring writers?"
(You can find the entire question on the helicopter blog)

My answer to this question was as common and cliché as the question itself.

Just write.

I know,  you've read it before.  It's the answer all writers and self-proclaimed writers (I am more self-published than second party published in every area of my writing) give when confronted with the question.  This isn't because we're plagiarists. It's not because all writers lack imagination.  It's not even because we were all given the same advice and then never thought about it again.  The reason most writers give this answer is because it's a simple, but powerful, truth.  If you're writing, you're a writer.  You may not be a good writer.  You may not even be a coherent writer, but  we all have to start somewhere.

Another thing authors, screenwriters, poets, columnists and writers of every sort will point out is that writing is one of the few passions people can pursuit without any significant financial investment at all.  If you have some time to set aside, a pen and a pad, you can get started in writing something.  Sure software and apps help make it faster, check our spelling and now ever our grammar, but to just write and find you voice, all you need is about $2 worth of supplies and someplace quiet and well lit to work.

My first 40 or so first short stories were written on legal pads with disposable pens.  My sister and my Mom eventually typed out a few of them on a word processor for me the first times I submitted them and had them rejected by publishers.  Three of those stories became the first three short films I did when I "returned" to filmmaking after the disaster that was my first feature movie.

And that brings me to my next point.

Trim down your obstacles to work on your rough spots.

"Z: The Last Letter" is a black and white silent movie about a dog and a mail man.  There is no spoken dialogue and it was all shot outside, during the day.  It is also based on one of those short stories I wrote way back when I had first gotten out of college and thought I'd try to do some writing before I got a "regular job".  You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

I had produced a feature horror video a few years earlier and hit the same pitfalls many of us did before digital made picture quality easier to maintain and tips and tricks were everywhere to be found online.  My lighting at night wasn't enough, the microphone I used barely captured audio from more than a few feet away and I tried to produce a story well outside of my budget or level of ability at the time.  So, I decided to make some shorts and work my way up through my weaknesses.  By eliminating lighting at night and recording sound on location I eliminated my two biggest production problems and was able to concentrate on the story and character direction.

I think this can be applied to writing as well.  If you want to write a novel, start with some short stories.

Maybe you have trouble composing complex plot lines, or intersecting stories. Maybe your weakness, as is mine, is character development. Perhaps you have some difficulty with describing locations or surroundings in a satisfying way.  Try what I did with the shorts.  Choose what you or your readers feel your weakest spot is and eliminate it from work you plan to publish or submit to others for publication. For now. Take this same area that  you need practice in and make it the center of your personal projects.  

Which leads us to my next point.

Let others read your work.

If you're like me, the trouble here is finding people who aren't aware of or worried about your fragile ego.  I know, how could a mega talented, handsome, charming, modest demi-god like myself have a fragile ego?  Well, I do. I can prove it.  Remember those 40 or so short stories I mentioned?  How many have  you ever heard of or seen printed here?  

Exactly.  Once those first rejection letters came in, I more or less gave up.  For a good long time.  Eventually some got published on websites or in small printed publications, but I never felt they were very successful and so I sort of stopped writing for awhile.  Not writing meant, you guessed it, I wasn't a writer.

You need to let people read your stuff and give you constructive criticism.  Not all criticism will be constructive and that you'll need to ignore.  The most useless stuff will often come from other writers who really love your work, but sort of hate you.  Learning what to take to heart and what to ignore is probably the most difficult part of starting out.  Let me give you some rules to live by as a writer.

There are no rules to writing.

This is obviously not true.  If you want people to understand what you write and you want the experience to be somewhat enjoyable and easy to follow, the basic rules of grammar and spelling will apply most of the time.  Knowing these rules and learning when to break them will also allow you to add flare to your writing and give your characters some depth.

That said, writing being a creative endeavor, any other rules helpful writing instructors may give you, such as, "You should introduce all of  your main characters within the first act of a play" or "Never introduce a plot point that isn't going to develop and resolve by the end of your story" are to be looked upon as guidelines and NOT hard and fast rules.

Basically, aside from proper grammar and spelling, my only hard and fast rule in any art form is that there are no hard and fast rules in any art form.

Being creative is about bending or breaking conventions.  Knowing when bending or breaking a convention actually works for readers or an audience is where the talent portion comes in.  That goes back to the need to have other people read your work.

You know what you're trying to say with your story, so often things that read as fine to you will still confuse other people.  It's like a family in-joke that makes you and all of your cousins crack  up, but when a friend who doesn't know the background of the story is around they get that blank stare while the rest of you chuckle.  Your readers may not have the same context as  you and you need to be aware of that.

Writers read.

I do not read enough to be an excellent writer.  My interest in reading came late in life and for screenwriting I grew up during a golden age of mediocre television. The fact that I watched more TV shows than movies as a kid definitely presents itself in my earlier screenplays, which play out more like old anthology episodes than films.

Read what you enjoy, but occasionally read stuff that bores the heck out of you in order to expand your perspective.  Read the classics.  Read things assigned widely in schools.  These will put you in touch with the "collective unconscious" of many of your readers.  Read the news, if you can find anything that qualifies.  Read nature magazines, fashion magazines, car magazines and magazines and websites about things you have no interest in at all.

If nothing else, reading so many things that don't interest you will inspire you to sit down and write something that does.  Hopefully it will interest other people too and you'll be on  your way to being a published writer.

Either way, you will have written something and thus, on that day, you will be a writer.

This is an inside HFP episode about "Z", but to watch the film
Please visit the Amazon links above.
It's still free with an ad, but I think you'll find the quality there
a bit better, and honestly, I'll make a bit more if you're
signed into your Prime Account.

Editing When It's Your Second or Third Job

Filmmaking may be your passion.  It may be the most important thing in your life aside from eating and breathing, but if you're getting tips from me, there's a good chance that it's not the thing paying all, or even most, of your bills.  That eating thing you need to do requires  you to have another job, so filmmaking sometimes takes a back seat to (gasp) RESPONSIBILITY.

Well, I'm currently editing a movie that it's taking me a year to finish up the shooting on. Read some other of my blogs and you'll see the myriad of excuses, causes, reasons and whatnot that has gotten me to this point.  But all of this has taught some things about organizing my time, now that it's mostly under my control again, and I'm going to pass these little tricks on to  you.

Know what requires the computer's time, but not yours.

In digital editing there are tasks that require very little of  your time, but a fair amount of the computer's time.  For example, transferring footage from CF or SD cards to  your computer's hard drives. The larger the cards you shoot with, the longer it will take to transfer your footage and back it up to a second source.  This time can be spent doing other things, but  you will want to keep a semi-clear head so that you know you've moved and backed up every shot you may ever want before you format that card.  I miss tapes in this regard because the transferring of footage from a digital tape to a hard drive was an opportunity to trim footage and not capture all of the "garbage".  Sometimes you wouldn't even bother transferring takes that had no value in the movie and no comedic value for outtakes, plus you got to name them during the process.  Also, the tape itself acted as the "back up" unless you planned to erase it to shoot on it again, which I never did.

So, what was the downside?  You couldn't always leave the computer alone while the footage moved over.  Batch captures were a thing, but they didn't always work very well and you lost other benefits, such as unique names for each clip.

I transferred the footage for Jack vs Lanterns long ago, but currently I'm importing files to a project and it's going to need to "conform the audio".   That takes awhile, so I'm writing this blog.

Renders are another good time to step away and get something else done, although shorter scenes may only leave you room to go to the restroom.

Always back up your work, but maybe do it efficiently.
Okay, a hard drive crash can ruin any editors day.  RAID systems help and backing up all of your settings, your computer, etc, etc.  Some of these things take a lot of time and others take a good amount of money.  Two things not every indie movie maker has.  For cloud editors this may seem moot, but I would suggest backing up your cloud based work to a hard drive in your possession, when possible, because any single location can become a problem.

Here's an old trick that won't allow you to salvage every project, but will at least make your day suck less should a drive crash.  At the end of your scene edit or  your day of editing, export all of your final cuts to a different hard drive.  So, here's how this works.  You just edited scenes 23, 27 and 29.  You export them to drop into the larger movie project timeline.  Instead of exporting them to the same drive you're working on, you export them to a different hard drive.  Preferably external.

Now, if the drive you're editing on crashes, you do lose the projects for 23, 27, and 29, but the final cuts  you had are still there, sitting on another drive.  And vice verse.  If you lose the exports,  you can always export them again because the edited projects are safe on a separate hard drive.

Take advantage of the digital copy of your script.

I don't care what software you used to write  your script, it will come in handy during editing.  I used to edit either from memory (for shorts) or from a paper script.  This edit, I'm mostly using my digital copy of a revised version of the shooting script.  For one thing, I have no  desk real estate to give to a binder with 98 pages in it.  I'll still refer to my notes now and then, but I don't have the script next to me all the time.

For another, all this time later and how we shot a bit rushed, it can sometimes be tough to figure out on the face of it which scene the footage I'm about to edit is from.  Sure, I may have shouted out the number and it should be on my slate, but cuts, recuts, rewrites, etc, moves pages and scene number around.  If I can't find a scene by number, with the digital script, nearly any keyword will allow me to find it in a minute or two. (Usually less.)  It also makes it quicker to skip around to all of the scenes shot in one location or on one set. "INT. LAB" was my search term for 3 days of editing.

Use multiple smaller projects.

It can take awhile to load a project with a lot of clips, audio, special F/X layers, etc.  Breaking your movie down into smaller projects makes each one easier to load and easier to manage.

Some will make sense to compile into one project.  For example, all of those Lab scenes were a single project.  It let me import the backgrounds to be keyed in once and I could also reference the lighting and chroma key settings from previous timelines for the next scene very easily.  

Plan breaks.

One of the biggest problems with time managing your passion is knowing when to stop.  Your other job, your spouse, your kids or pets will all need  you to have some energy left for them.  Plan interruptions that will make you stop every few hours, especially if you're tackling a very big edit.

Whether it be dinner, walking the dog, or just some down time before bed, decide before  you start editing about when you'll stop and why.  Set an alarm if you have to in order remind yourself.  Also, being your own boss on this project, know that you can ignore that alarm if you're really in a groove, but try not to abuse that privilege.

Happy editing! 

Time Off Can Hurt You

Recently I went on a short trip.  Only four days.  I think I ignored the blog for about six days because of it.  I was trying to get some specific editing done before we left and I didn't have a whole lot of access to Wi-Fi while I was gone.  In fact, just typing that sentence I realize I got an email, which I read just before the plane brought us home, that I still need to respond to because I didn't want to try and type my response on my phone.

At First All Seemed Fine.

When I first got back I figured I had better write a blog post and get back into the groove of updating everyone regularly.  When I clicked over to check how many readers we had lost, I was surprised to find out that things had chugged along pretty nicely even without any new content being posted for days.  My numbers had dropped maybe 10% -20% from the week before.  Not bad considering there was nothing new to see.  This left me optimistically thinking that once I started writing again, the numbers would go back up to normal and then continue to grow as they had been before I left.

Boy Was I Wrong.

It's almost like people just needed to see something new in order to decide that they weren't interested in the blog anymore.  Our first new post since we got back seemed to get about 50% of the traffic of the ones posted up until then, but the daily traffic overall has gone down about 80% in the week I've been back to it.  I think this is the fourth or fifth blog I've written in a week (if you include the CGM Blog hosting Monique Dupree's video from her live shoot with Tara Cardinal.  Pop over to our Cult Magazine Blogs to see it.)  That's a pretty normal amount of content for me right now, but we're still down on views.

Maybe It's A Social Disease.

Perhaps part of the change is how things now work on platforms I use to promote this blog.  I am posting less to YouTube and Facebook has changed how links show in the newsfeed.  Also, I admit, that I have snoozed about 20% of my friends list for 30 days.  Today some of those ended and suddenly those friends are liking or commenting on my stuff again.  I think when you snooze someone, Facebook hides your feed from them as well.

It's no secret my YouTube activity has been way down.  I did use the blog to refer to things on the channel and vice-verse.  While I have turned off the searchability of many of the videos on YouTube, I have left most of them active on my channel and they can still be seen in the free theatre on my website http://www.hocfocprod.com . But not posting new videos means no new links back to my blog in the descriptions.

As much as the dates of these changes coincide with the trip, I can't help but think that "being away from things" was the major factor.

What I Should Have Done.

Just like I can schedule videos to post on YouTube days or weeks in advance, I should have done that here.  I can write blogs ahead of time and set them up to post at a later date.  The trouble is, I like to keep them topical and as you can see, I do tend to write a bit "stream of conscious" here.  That would be lost on pre-written blogs.  I would also then have to figure out how to announce them.

I guess these are all things I can try the next time I have to travel, or maybe I'll set some up to publish on auto pilot when I have a few days of shooting ahead of me.  That way I can write about what I know I'll be shooting and set it  up to post on the day I'm shooting because I'll be too busy to write about it then.  I can also read it after the shoot and see how closely my fantasy of how things would go on the production  match with how they actually DID go.

Here is a video I shot and set up to publish on Christmas, I believe.

Miniature Helicopter Experiment part II - Making the Rotors Spin

Digitally attaching spinning rotors to the helicopter.

Making things move in post, including a hovering robot.

See the retro robot and the Crazy Fishman both in action in

Onyx Origins on Amazon Prime!

http://www.amazon.com/v/hocusfocusproductions

Updates! Youtube, chin-ups and Jack vs Lanterns

Sorry, gang.  I was in NY doing a little work and catching up with some family.  Fell a bit behind on everything, so I'm going to list a few updates here.

The Chin Up Bar: Just before leaving, I did manage my first unassisted Chin-up.  No bands, but also no camera.  Honestly, I didn't think I could do it.  I was walking by the room where the bar is set up, grabbed hold of it, pulled and boom, I was looking over the top of it.  Over the next few days, I tried a few more times and was able to get two or three out before I couldn't manage another without help.  What really surprised me was that I had gained weight before this, so it was just strength and form helping me out.  I'm actually fatter than when I started and I still can't do a "pull  up" with my palms facing in without assistance.  Working on that. So  my "end of January" goal was a bit too ambitious.

Also, I was gone for four days.  I managed to do some exercises with bands, but my Dad was afraid the strap would mark up the tops of his doors, so I didn't get to do pull downs and lost the ability to do that chin up.  In just four or five days.  Flip side: the foam on the bar (I hope to make a video of this soon), ripped.  I patched it, but not before it did in fact mark  up the frame of my door.  Not a tough fix, but something the makers of the bar claim to protect against.  Maybe I shouldn't leave it up there all time?  Contact with the door being constant may have caused a problem, but I don't know.

YouTube! As of yesterday, it's official.  After many, many years of keeping my account in good standing, I am no longer a YouTube partner.  Dropped because my views and subscribers were not enough.  Will I keep working the channel?  Yes.  Like this blog, it has run off benefits that make it worthwhile, but as soon as the next viable platform presents itself, I'll be more than willing to move.  Also, as I've said before, it has dropped way down on the priorities list and I appreciate anyone who does watch the videos doing so here or on my website (when available), where I will still be paid for your "impressions".

Jack vs Lanterns: Like the chin ups, this was something I was "in a groove" on before the weekend away, but completely lost my flow while I was gone.  I got back to working on the movie last night.  Technically, I guess I did work on it a bit while I was away.  A couple of months ago I shot my "bearded scenes" over a course of two nights.  These were scenes with just my character that I had left until I got all of the other talent out of the way.  Well, I missed one.  I had already shaved for the post-beard scenes.  Since I was going to be away, I decided to let the beard grow back.  This way I could pick up that last page of bearded dialogue after we were home.

Well, a few things happened.  The beard grew in, but it is nearly all grey now.  Also, as I mention above, I gained weight.  I am noticeably fatter in the scene.  For the beard, rather than dye it (it came off today), I grabbed an old mascara that my wife tried to throw out awhile ago and brushed it into my facial hair.  Worked pretty well, I think.  For the fat, I wore a weight training belt.  It was tight.  I could barely breath.  But I managed to get the essential lines out and today I am back to stubble.  I didn't want to dye my beard again because that stuff takes a quite a few steps to put in, makes a mess if you're not careful and costs way more than discarded, clumpy old mascara.

Movies: Dealing with some post travel insomnia, I did manage to watch a bunch of independent movies, so more reviews will be coming soon.  Let me list some titles here so that I don't forget them:
Parasite
Revolt of the Empire of the Apes
Beyond Fear
Devil's Express
Robowar

See you soon, gang.

Stop Motion Animation Using "Digital Puppets"

I did a video on this awhile back, which mixed old style stop motion with digital in order to work around a puppet I had designed poorly.  More recently I used it to enhance a scene in Jack vs Lanterns because I wasn't happy with the in camera movement we had set up for the pumpkin goop in a scene. (I'm still not entirely happy, but at this budget level if I'm entirely happy it's a real treat).

You can see the second part on my YouTube Channel

A Magician should never reveal his secrets.

And movie magic sometimes loses it's flare when explained before viewing.

I'm always reluctant to reveal in camera or simple editing tricks because then when people see them they're somehow less impressed than when they thought I used some more complex method.  Seriously, the effect looks the same as when they saw it in the movie, but when I've revealed how simple some of the vines moving in Lumber vs Jack were to achieve people remarked with a sigh and a "Oh, I thought you used some fancy CGI or something,"  as if accomplishing something with a tried and true method somehow makes it "less".

Anyway, in this particular scene I had used my regular bag of tricks.  Reverse footage, jiggling the gelatin based goop and pushing it from off screen with a hair dryer were all employed to varying levels of effectiveness.  But the scene needed a bit "extra". I'm no CG guru and really, that wouldn't fit into the movie's overall retro look well, so I went with the next best thing. Cartoonish 2D animation.

How the trick was done.

Basically I took frame captures from the scene, isolated the "goop" and treated it like a stop motion puppet, building individual frames to make it appear to move.  Had I thought of it before the scene, I may have tried building a wire puppet of latex and wire with a shiny, gooey appearance, but this was something that came up after the fact.  The beauty of digital is that you can make a lot of decisions after the fact if you have the time, patience and software/app to handle the job.

I built the frames in Photoshop, as I did in the stop motion video above, but this time I used the liquefy and smudge tools to manipulate the puppet instead of the "puppet" setting, since the blob has no real appendages.  The real key was separating it from the background using a TIFF with a transparency layer so that the manipulation of the goop would affect as little of the surrounding image as possible.  This also solves the problem of trying to "key" it in the image later.

After the movie is finished, if I get a chance, I'll try to do a video on the process.  Meanwhile, feel free to ask questions and discuss with others in the comments below.

What it looks like on screen.

Here is a brief look at one of the animations.

YouTube!

If you've been reading this blog for awhile or following my YouTube Channel, it's no secret that at the end of 2017 I made a push to "grow" both this blog and the channel.  Mostly, I just made sure to use both a bit more, let people know I was doing that and hoped a few people would care.

Well, not enough people cared about the YouTube channel.  At least, not according to YouTube.  You see, even in a world where anyone can make shows and videos and put them out for public consumption, ratings matter.  Now more than ever, because I can't even monetize a video ( or won't be able to, rather) unless I have 1000 subscribers and a specific number of  viewed minutes from the preceding 365 days.   What does this mean?  If I'm not really making money now, what do I lose?  A few bucks?  Think about it a minute. If I happen to hit the viral video jackpot, I lose the opportunity to make the money from those first few hundreds of thousands of views.  Sure, it's like buying  lottery ticket, but if you won the lottery wouldn't you want it to pay off?

Also, there's a slight matter of respect.  My channel has been in good standing on YouTube for YEARS.  Sure, it didn't earn me much, which means it didn't earn them much, but part of that was because I avoided breaking a lot of laws that maybe would have boosted the channel's traffic.  I mean, a lot of people show up to a job that doesn't pay well, but if that job suddenly said, "Hey, we'd like you to keep doing the same work, but aren't going to pay you at all anymore", that would be rude, right?

Maybe I should look at it as being fired.  Or my show was cancelled. Put on my "big boy pants" and suck it up. The real question is, why did YouTube suddenly decide that channels not earning a certain amount aren't worth having around?  They were always glad to have the small drops filling their bucket before. I can't speak for them, but with the way the "Not suitable for all advertisers" label was handled, I have my suspicions.  Smaller channels don't produce enough to be as profitable now that they also have to be policed manually by YouTube.  Paying people costs money.  What I find offensive is that the policing of content is being dropped for small providers instead of large channels that have broken the rules in the past.

If I post violent content, lie about it and try to get advertisers under false pretenses, fine.  Take away my partner privileges, but to punish my little channel because other channels  have broken the rules is disrespectful.  There is no loyalty in business anymore.

I'm ranting about YouTube on this blog and the revenue for this comes from the same ads as they did on YouTube.  It's one of the major problems with monopolies.  They're very difficult to boycott.

Will I stop giving YouTube content and growing the channel because I'm insulted?  Probably not.  At least, not until a viable competitor comes along.  I think I mentioned this in another blog.  It's a still a decent place to promote movies and the easiest place to host stuff that I can then embed on my website (also ad supported).

Sorry if this is a repetitive blog.  I've been editing a lot lately and don't have a lot of new stuff to talk about here at the moment, but I want to keep up with writing in this space.  Also, YouTube sent out a survey asking creators for opinions and it sort of dredged all of this up again.

Let me know below if there's anything specific  you'd like to hear about.

Editing the Wide Shots First and Why

If you read my last blog, you know that to get through a long shoot day with limited time, I like to shoot the close-ups first. You can read about that here if you missed it and then come back to this blog if you'd like.

Lay your foundation:

If you followed the first method, hopefully by the time you got to your wide shot the blocking, lines and everything else were spot on.  Hopes are fleeting though and more likely, something still went wrong and you didn't get one long, perfect take.  Someone may have missed a line, a car may have passed or a plane flew overhead or the camera got jostled by a rogue P.A.  Or maybe the pace is just a bit off and needs to be tightened.

Whatever the case, that wide shot is still a great way to establish  your scene and it may be how you open, or at least you want to show it somewhere near the beginning of things.  Drop the best take of  your wide shot and the subsequent "pick  ups" into your timeline.  See how they flow.

Clear up mistakes first: 

As much as you may have planned in your head, your notes or your story boards to have a particular line said as a wide shot, maybe you didn't catch it.  Maybe 2 minutes into a three minute scene somebody flubbed a line or sneezed.  Whatever the reason, you need to cut away to an appropriate close up in order to bridge the clips without a jump cut.  ( A really fast paced scene can sometimes benefit from jump cuts, but for general dialogue I avoid them).

You don't want constant cutting back and forth to ruin your pace, so it's best to get in and clean up your wide shot with the close ups you'll absolutely have to use first.  This way you know the cuts that HAVE to made are taken care of and you won't waste time setting a pace only to have it ruined by a compulsory edit later.

A Wide Shot from Lumber vs Jack which was interrupted 

when I forgot my lines...again.

Enhancing a performance:

You've used the greatest actors  you can afford an some who you can't.  Every moment they're in front of the camera is sheer theatrical perfection!  But, some moments are more perfect than others.  Now that you know you have  your scene, go back through and check your talent's close up performances against their wide shots.  You may find that they gave a better moment during their close up.  I have experienced this with a few actors who seem to put a bit more into it when they know "they're on".  This is often true of reaction shots.  So, if you want your actors to love you, make as many of their best moments hit the screen as possible.

Set Your Pace:

Once you have all of your necessary clean up cuts in place and you know your actors look their best, you can start trimming your scene down to make the conversation flow more naturally.  You may need some dramatic pauses or  you may need to overlap some audio in order to make  characters seem to be responding to each other in a rapid fire argument.  Whatever the case, with your wide shot foundation set, you can now concentrate on setting the proper mood.  You've edited out your mistakes and have all of the lines in place.  If you need to tighten up some lines using the wide angle footage's audio you can avoid a visual jump cut by dropping a reaction shot into the mix.  Clip out the extra wide footage and cut back to it in a moment where things are working.  Lay the existing useable audio under your reaction footage. If you shot everyone's close ups all the way through, you should have plenty of footage to use for this purpose.

Check for continuity:

Things get a bit more complicated  here.  Changing the pacing or just a bit of forgetfulness during shooting can cause differences between the staging in  your wide shots from your close ups.  Often you won't have a dedicated continuity person on set, but making edits seamless relies on the small details matching between the wide and close shots.  Someone's eye line may be different from one shot to the next, or their arms are folded and then suddenly outstretched.  Maybe they're holding a coffee cup in some shots and not holding it others or it changes hands.  Whatever the small continuity errors are, the less of them that you let slip by (and some will ), the more you'll draw people into the story.  

This is a handy time to have a "cat". (Check the video on that.)  

You can also cut away to a close up of any character who happens to match between shots.  If all of  your characters are "out of whack" at this point, consider cutting to whoever is not speaking.  They're less likely to be the focus of the moment and their idiosyncrasy may be less noticeable.

Watch it again: 

When you're finished, watch it all again.  You'll probably find something that you wish to tighten up. I find things like that at the movie's screening, two years later and whenever I watch the movies I've made, but I like to catch most of them before I commit it to DVD, BluRay or streaming, when I can still do something about it.  Watch the scene a few more times before calling it "done".

The long and short of it:

Much like the shooting close ups first process, this isn't suggesting you rush things, but if you have a client who hired you on short notice or you're entered into a 24 hour film festival, these kinds of mechanics will speed things along.

I find having "steps" helps me immensely with the process.  Do I always follow them?  Of course not.  Artistic endeavors rarely benefit from being "step by step", but when you're looking at hundreds of hours of footage and trying to cut it into a 90 minute story, it sure helps to have a place to start.

Talk to you soon, gang.