You have watched this cut four hundred times. You cannot see it any more. Twenty five strangers can, and in ninety minutes they will show you exactly where it holds them and exactly where it lets go.
Mobile cinema, recruited audience, the full report in 24 hours. Confidentiality agreement signed before we receive your cut.
First Audience launches at the Negril Universal Film Festival in October 2026. For every test screening held on or before 8 October 2027, the research and the report are included at no charge. You pay only the standard cinema rate for the night.
Nothing like this has existed here before, and the fastest way to prove what it is worth is to put it in the hands of the first filmmakers who ask. Founding-year slots are limited and allocated in order of deposit.
Claim a Founding-Year SlotEvery filmmaker reaches the same blind spot. You know the film too well to watch it. The people close to you are too kind, too invested, or too tired of hearing about it to tell you the truth. So you carry the cut to a festival and find out what does not work from a room full of programmers, buyers and critics, at the exact moment you can no longer change a frame of it.
After the fiftieth pass you are watching your memory of the film, not the film. Every gap is filled in by what you know was meant to be there.
Cast and crew love you. Family loves you. That is not data, and it has never once saved a film in the edit.
A festival rejection tells you no. It never tells you that you lost the room at minute thirty four, or that half the audience could not follow the timeline.
Not because the method is complicated, but because nobody was bringing a cinema, an audience and a research instrument to a director on island budgets.
Test screening is not a new idea and it is not a gimmick. Harold Lloyd was doing it in 1928. The studios formalised it in the 1970s, and today around ninety percent of wide-release films are tested, most of them three separate times, at a cost of ten to twenty thousand US dollars per screening. Producers who commission it describe it as the best money a production spends.
Runtime, genre, what stage you are at, and the one thing you are most worried about. We sign a confidentiality agreement before we ever see a frame. You get a written quote and a date.
HD projection, screen, silent headphones and lighting on independent power, anywhere on the island. We can recruit an audience that matches who your film is actually for, or you bring your own. Every attendee signs an agreement at the door.
Every viewer reacts anonymously on their own phone while they watch, then answers eight questions at the credits. Within 24 hours you get a private link with the numbers, the minute-by-minute read, and a plain summary of what the data shows.
Not a pile of comment cards. A structured report built on the metrics the research industry actually reports on, plus a moment-by-moment layer that a paper questionnaire has never been able to give anyone. We report what the room did. We do not tell you what to change. Every number and every comment arrives as the audience gave it, and the decisions stay yours.
The percentage who rated it Excellent, on its own. Studios lead with this rather than an average, because enthusiasm predicts behaviour and mild approval does not.
The percentage who would definitely tell a friend to see it. For an independent film this is usually the most predictive single number in the report.
Every reaction in the room stamped against your runtime, so you can see the exact minute it leaned in, the exact minute it went quiet, and where people checked out.
The three points where the most viewers registered confusion or drift, ranked, with the tap counts behind each one.
What percentage followed the story, and whether the room felt it dragged, moved about right, or rushed.
Every character viewers named when asked who stayed with them, ranked by how many named them. Characters nobody mentioned do not appear.
How each viewer said they would describe your film to a friend, in their own words, unedited.
Anonymous and unedited. The thing they would never say to your face, which is exactly the thing you need.
A private showing of an unfinished film to a recruited audience, held to measure how it performs before it is locked. It has been standard studio practice since the 1970s. The audience is chosen to reflect who the film is for, watches in normal conditions, and answers a structured questionnaire immediately afterwards, before anyone has had a chance to talk each other into a shared opinion.
Fewer than you think. Studio screenings use three to five hundred, but that scale is for testing marketing rather than testing whether the film plays. Twenty to thirty strangers who would genuinely choose your genre will tell you more about your edit than a hundred people who came because they know you. Accuracy of recruitment matters more than headcount.
Rough cut if you want to be able to change something structural, because that is when you still can. Fine cut if you want to confirm the film works and generate numbers to carry into a sales or festival conversation. Many productions do both. Testing after picture lock tells you what went wrong and leaves you no room to act on it.
Every attendee signs a confidentiality agreement at the door. Phones are collected where you require it. Recruitment tells people the genre and nothing else, no title, no cast, no synopsis. The venue and date are never publicised. We sign our own confidentiality agreement with you before we receive a single frame, and you are welcome to have your lawyer look at it first.
Only if you test too late to act on it, or hand the report to people who should not have it. The report is yours. It is delivered on a private link and nobody sees it unless you send it to them. A weak number found in the edit is a problem. The same number found after release is a post mortem.
Either. We can recruit viewers who match your target audience by genre interest and age, which is the version we recommend, because your own network cannot give you a stranger's reaction. If you would rather bring your own room, we will still run the instrument and produce the report, and we will note in the report that the audience was not independently recruited.
Then let the room fund itself. A First Audience screening is an outdoor cinema night with popcorn, and people already pay to attend those. We can sell the seats to the public rather than billing them to you, which leaves you covering the setup only and fills the room with exactly the strangers the research needs. Viewers who paid their own way to be there give more honest answers than anyone the production invited.
Anywhere on the island. The cinema is mobile and runs on its own power, so a yard, a beach, a lawn, a studio floor, a community centre or a hotel property all work. We handle delivery, setup and pull-down.
For any screening held on or before 8 October 2027 the research and the report cost nothing. You pay the standard cinema rate for the night, which covers the projection, the screen, the silent headphones, the lighting, the setup and a seat with refreshment for every person in the room. After that date a report fee of $20,000 is added. Tell us the runtime, roughly how many viewers you want and where in Jamaica you want it held, and you will have a written quote the same week. Nothing is confirmed until a deposit is received and acknowledged in writing.
No. Authored and arthouse work tests just as usefully, the questions simply change. Instead of asking whether a film has broad appeal, we ask whether the effect you intended is landing on the audience you intended it for. That is a fair question to ask of any film, and the answer is often surprising.
Tell us the title or working title, the runtime, the stage of the cut, roughly how many viewers you want in the room, and where in Jamaica you would like it held. If you already know the one thing you are most anxious about in the edit, tell us that too, because we will build the screening around finding out whether you are right.
Quotes valid 14 days. A deposit confirms the date. Confidentiality agreement signed before we receive your cut.