Run a creative review by deciding three things before anyone speaks: what is open, what is locked, and who decides. Then have the most junior person in the room give feedback first and the decision-maker last. Reviews that open with the senior opinion are not reviews, they are briefings, and everyone in the room adjusts to the first strong signal whether they intend to or not.
Setup
Invite fewer people. Everyone who can approve, everyone who will build, and nobody who is only there to be informed. Informed people get the summary. A review with nine attendees produces nine opinions and no decision.
Send the work in advance with the scope note attached: what this round is about and what is settled. People who watch a cut for the first time in the meeting give first-reaction notes, which are about the opening three seconds.
Name the decider out loud. Ambiguity here is why reviews end without decisions and reconvene twice.
The agenda
| Block | Time | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Restate objective and scope | 3 min | What the brief asked; what is open this round |
| Watch or view, uninterrupted | 5 min | Whole thing, sound up, no commentary |
| Round the room, junior first | 15 min | One pass each, no cross-talk |
| Decider responds | 5 min | Reconciles, names the direction |
| Change list, read back | 5 min | Explicit, scoped, agreed in the room |
Thirty to forty minutes. Reviews that run ninety minutes are design sessions in disguise, and design by committee is what they produce.
The rules that make it work
Watch it once, all the way through, with sound. No pausing. Pausing turns a review into a shot-by-shot critique, which is the wrong altitude for a first pass.
Junior first, decider last. The single highest-leverage change most teams can make. It costs nothing and it is the difference between hearing what people think and hearing what people think you think.
One pass each, no debate during the round. Debate happens after everyone has spoken, and half the disagreements dissolve once the full set of notes is on the table.
Every note carries a timecode and names a problem rather than prescribing a fix. See how to give feedback on video creative for the note format.
Nothing locked gets reopened. If someone raises a locked item, write it down as a future consideration and move on. Reopening settled decisions is what turns a two-round project into five.
Close with a change list, read aloud
The meeting ends when someone reads the change list back and everyone agrees it is complete. Each item names what changes, who does it, and by when. Items nobody will own get cut in the room rather than discovered as unowned a week later.
Anything raised but not on the list is explicitly parked, out loud. The parking is what stops it returning as a surprise in the next round.
The AI-specific additions
Two things worth building into the agenda when the work is generated.
Separate model problems from direction problems. A hand with six fingers and a scene that does not land are different categories: one is a re-generation, the other is a rethink. Mixing them in the same list means the team fixes the cheap thing and misses the expensive one.
Use the cheapness of alternates. When a beat is in dispute, ask for two options on that beat rather than arguing about it. On 8frame an 8-second Veo 3.1 Lite alternate with audio is 54 credits and a 5-second Kling v3 Standard alternate is 86, roughly $0.54 to $0.86 at pack rate. Deciding by looking beats deciding by describing, and it costs less than the meeting time spent arguing.
FAQ
How many people should be in a creative review? Three to five. Beyond that, add asynchronous reviewers who send notes rather than attend.
Should the client be in the internal review? No. Internal review is where the work gets good enough to show. Combining the two means the client watches you disagree, which erodes confidence in the recommendation.
What if there is no clear decider? Then the meeting cannot end, and the fix is upstream. Name one before scheduling the next review.
Reviews go faster when the versions and the notes live on the same surface the work does. Multiple people can comment on an 8frame canvas in real time; the canvas is free and unlimited, and generation is paid from $19/month.