What Happens When You Pay a Stranger $25 to Edit Your Pizza Commercial?

Heading to freelancer marketplaces and seeking out cheap and inexperienced creatives to edit or retouch photos is fun (though perhaps not as fun as finding people to write bass guitar riffs), but what happens when you ask an editor to cut your raw footage of a commercial? This video finds out.

Daniel Schiffer’s raw footage of a pizza commercial looks rather smart, but it’s fascinating to see the results when you pay someone next to nothing to cut it together for you, especially when you compare the results to editors who are charging significantly more. It’s hard to say whether it’s impressive or unnerving that people are offering their services and put in so much work for such tiny amounts of money.

For anyone who’s in the process of learning how to edit, this video offers a few great insights on how the same footage and similar soundtracks can be cut together so differently. It’s also evident that blending slow-motion footage with speed ramps isn’t always as easy at it might seem. And for non-video people such as me, it’s a nice insight into the immense amount of creativity that can go into editing something as simple as a pizza commercial.

Schiffer randomly forks out for a few voiceovers, and it’s well worth watching the entire video to hear the results. 

Which one was your favorite? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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2 Comments

Website like freelancer.com are to avoid.
The rating system is completely wrong.
If someone gives you a "bad" rating cause you failed to deliver; you can just remove the project from your dashboard and keep only the 5 starts one's to get more job.Even your completion rate is not affected, this is ridiculous.
.
You got warned.

Wow, impressive results for so little. I wonder how much work the editors put into these. I'm about to do some editing on vids with more technical subject matter (ie not ads), and to do that you'd need background knowledge. I don't dare ask what they would cost.