Mentour Pilot

Shortform editor

Following my success in kickstarting Veritasium's social presence, I was asked to come on board with Mentour Pilot to bring their shortform content strategy to life.

I spent 7 months on Mentour Pilot before stepping back to focus more on Veritasium again, but in that time I created clips from their backbook content that grew their follower numbers in orders of thousands, and brought in tens of millions of views. On leaving I provided the style guide and set the tone for all shorts for new editors coming onto the team there.

I created a range of content from existing longform videos, bringing in 10x more views onto new videos a few months in compared to my starting time. My first full month alone, I brought in over 5 million views on Instagram and a further 1.5 million on TikTok.

I took the long (1hr+ sometimes) videos and cut them down and serialised them, trying to have a strong hook at the start of each part but still having the story flow from episode to episode.

Not only did I turn longform videos into short episodes, I took out clips to stand alone that would educate the audience on aviation topics and terminology.

Coming up with grabbing titles was important to keep people watching each episode of the longer story, I was constantly trying new things and learning from the data on what formats and phrasings worked best.

I got to do some work on the new Mentour Pilot podcast when it started, including some quick low-lift intro clips, as well as editing parts of the podcast itself for shortform.

I would endeavour to get out clips from new videos as soon as possible when the videos were time-relevant - for example when there were large delays due to problems with United Airlines. This was to try to ride the wave of current interest and engagement by a wider audience in what would usually be quite niche content.

Opening with strong and readable visuals was something I prioritised, especially when translating the landscape video into portrait form as I did for all my shorts.

You may also like