Another month, another editing challenge from Finzar. We went undercover to see how much money we could make in 24 hours – this time editing only shorts. What we weren’t expecting when we started was just how awful the world of editing shorts really is.

We highly recommend watching the embedded video above (or follow this link) if you can, in which we go through my entire process of editing a showreel for shorts and finding a job, then into how exactly we got scammed (yes, really!).

To break it down a bit further, we spent two hours editing my showreel, and then about two-ish hours on each of the three shorts that we sent off to “clients”, with the rest of the 24 hours spent searching for jobs and negotiating pay.

Of those three jobs, the first – editing together an appearance of some Breaking Bad cast members on a late-night show – was the most “legit” as the client only ever asked for a sample with the idea of getting jobs down the line somewhere through his agency. Perhaps with more time, we could have established a relationship where, after seeing my skills, he could trust me with jobs. But the big caveat is that this was all for £2 a short, which is just wildly inappropriate for any skilled editor.

Next was the Fortnite short. We spent longer on this than any other short because we wanted to impress the client, but he ended up pulling the rug from under our feet. As you can see in the video, he literally edited an old message to make it look like we were doing it for free. It was genuinely shocking and shows just how desperate some of these people are. I’m glad that we were doing this for a challenge, rather than banking on being paid for my work to buy dinner…

Finally, the Katy Perry short. Although we didn’t finish the short, the whole situation was getting to a place which did not feel particularly kosher with the guy wanting to pay me in crypto currency – an immediate red flag. There was almost no chance that it wasn’t going to be a scam in some form, and even if it wasn’t, the payment was once again going to be so low that it would not have been realistically worth anyone’s time if it was.

At the end of the day, we didn’t find one legitimate person that we wanted to form any longform relationship with – which was completely different from my experience editing long-form videos (check out my weeklong video for what a good editing job looks like).

We would really recommend anyone looking to become a full-time editor focusses on long-form content. Which isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate shorts editor positions out there, but they are so few and far between, and the content is often so brain-rotting, that we’re just not sure it’s worth pursuing. There’s real money to be made in long-form content! And if you want to learn how to edit long-form contect, check out our Premiere Pro course page.

Team Finzar