Run a client review

What this is about

The moment a cut is shown live, the room does something a comment box never does: it reacts together. You see where people shift, where they check their phone, where someone leans in. That behavioural data is worth more than the notes they write afterwards, and it is only available if you resist pausing the film. The session itself needs the discipline of a meeting — an agenda, a timekeeper, a written outcome — because a review without those turns into an hour of associative wishes and produces nothing an editor can start from tomorrow.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Never let the client watch the cut for the first time alone in the meeting — either they saw it before, or you watch it together
• Play it once, end to end, with nobody speaking; the first watch is data collection, not discussion
• Sit where you can see faces rather than the screen you already know by heart
• Close every topic with a spoken decision and a name, then move on — open topics reopen by email

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Open with two minutes of framing: which version this is, what changed since the last one, what is deliberately still missing, and what you need decided by the end of the hour.
2. Play the cut once from start to finish with no pausing and no commentary. Watch the room instead of the screen and note where attention visibly drops or spikes.
3. Let the room speak freely for five minutes before you structure anything. First reactions contain the honest ones; steering too early replaces them with polite ones.
4. Then walk the timeline in order, section by section, and collect notes at their position. Jumping between topics produces the same discussion three times in different words.
5. Answer every note with either a plan or a consequence: what it would take, what it displaces, or why you recommend against it. Silence in that moment reads as agreement.
6. Write decisions live on a shared screen so the room sees its own conclusions. A note that nobody objects to while it is visible rarely comes back next week.
7. Reserve the last ten minutes for the summary: agreed changes, open questions with owners and dates, and the schedule impact if anything grew beyond the planned scope.
8. Send the written outcome the same day and ask for a short confirmation. A session without a written result is an hour of goodwill that expires before the next version.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Pausing the first playthrough to explain a shot that is not finished yet
• Letting the session drift into a wish workshop with no decision written down
• Inviting fifteen people so that nobody feels excluded and nobody feels responsible

With TillyGen

When a wish in the room means an extra shoot day, you can open the TillyGen schedule and show the consequence immediately — the trade gets decided in the meeting instead of surfacing weeks later as a scheduling problem.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.