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Can a TikTok reach the same artistic levels as a film?
Yes, if you ask Max Zavidow.
Max has spent four years engineering a style he calls the “really short film.” Today, he shares the production process behind his videos, how he funds them, and why he still turns down most brand deals that come his way.
In this episode:
🎬 The case for the "really short film" as an art form
💵 How posting fewer videos can bring in better deals
🧰 Inside a Webby-winning brand deal video
Listen to the podcast on your platform of choice | Scroll down to read our profile.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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The really short film, please
Max Zavidow posted only five short-form videos in 2025. Even the quietest pulled 3.1M views on TikTok alone; his most popular pulled 72M across platforms.
That standout, “Long Time,” is mesmerizing. In the entire two-and-a-half-minute film, you’d never guess where the story is going (and you’d also never guess it’s a brand sponsorship … until the diegetic ad break).
@formerteenheartthrob long time, no see :) #love #drsquatchpartner #longdistancerelationship written and directed by: yours truly and @Alistair Ogden shot an... See more
Four years earlier, Max was working as an investment banking analyst. He debuted on TikTok in December 2021 with unremarkable videos filmed in an anonymous apartment.
He'd been doing standup since college and wanted to pursue comedy more seriously, but he wasn't ready to take the full leap.
So he left the bank for an analyst role at the NBA on a 12-month contract. This slightly more creative-focused day job also provided him with more free time to work on comedy videos. He had to get used to TikTok as a medium; writing and filming short videos is a different challenge than writing and performing standup.
At the end of that year, and with no paying work lined up, Max declined to renew the contract. In retrospect, this was the right decision.
Within days of informing his boss of his decision to leave, Max received an email from Tinder — a partnership pitch would cover his living expenses for six months.
Developing a trademark style
By March 2022, Max took to the streets, filming himself talking into the camera as he walked, and his videos immediately started performing better.
Typical TikTok comments on Max’s videos, but these are specifically in response to his most popular video, “Long Time.”
Over the next year and a half, his style developed rapidly as he produced and posted video after video:
In April 2022, he goes truly viral for the first time with a character walking around the streets of New York doing bits about dating.
That summer, he digs into an Irish call-and-response song format trending on TikTok, pushing him past 500k followers.
By November 2022, he publishes his first real attempt at the narrative fiction he’s now known for. A fever-dream kissing game staged on a rooftop, “Pucker Up,” remains his most-liked TikTok, with 8.2 million likes.
Throughout 2023, Max continued to post constantly, testing pacing, structure, and attention mechanics in public.
His style truly solidified with "Third Wheel," published in September 2024, garnering 34.2M views (A note from editor Natalia: I probably made up 2% of those views with how much I replayed this when it first dropped).
@formerteenheartthrob tricycle no more #thirdwheel #couple
This is the “really short film.” It's ambitious narrative fiction native to vertical video, around three minutes long.
Every TikTok Max has published since has cracked a million views, and by September 2024, Max committed to a new rule: every video on his page, including ads, had to be a really short film, or he wouldn’t publish. He pitched brands on the format for months with almost no takers.
“I just want there to be a bar of excellence across everything that I do on TikTok and Instagram, where it can be branded, can be not branded, and you are just as happy to watch any of those videos.”
Monetization
Max's living is built almost entirely on these sponsored short films published to his TikTok and Instagram accounts.
He used to run roughly a dozen brand deals a year alongside writing, directing, and acting work for other people's projects, which accounted for around 15% of his time. As of 2026, his income now comes entirely from short films on his own page.
@formerteenheartthrob nothing like a family reunion :) #military #reunion #surprise #prediction directed by @lastmanstanley coedited by @Liam O’Neil (TikTok,... See more
To afford himself selectivity in the sponsors he works with, Max keeps his living costs to a minimum; he lives with roommates and keeps a daily spending budget. It took him years to figure out how to attract the right sponsors for his ambitious concepts.
Max had long admired the work of Grant Beene — a vertical-video creator working in a similar vein, who we interviewed earlier this year — and reached out to ask how he negotiated deals that provided him proper creative freedom.
“Know you're right,” Grant told him, “and be okay leaving money on the table when a brand won't let you make the work.”
Soon after, Max got a big break through his collaborator, Alistair Ogden, who had been approached by the men's natural soap brand Dr. Squatch to produce a video. He pitched them on co-directing a really short film with Max.
The budget was not enough to produce at Max's standard and turn a profit, so he funneled every dollar Dr. Squatch paid him back into the production, treating the finished video as a proof of concept for partnerships to come. The result was the aforementioned “Long Time,” which was awarded a Webby for Short Form Video of the Year a week before our interview.
Is the really short film art? Is it anything more than a vehicle for brand partnerships?
Every new medium in entertainment history, Max pointed out to us, has been dismissed as a lesser version of the one before it. Television was a step down from film, film was a step down from theater; writers and directors who chose the newer form were sellouts.
Vertical video sits in that moment now.
"What kind of stories exist for the phone that wouldn't even make sense for TV or movies? What kind of shots? What kind of pacing? In having respect for the phone as a medium, you just end up making different things."
A few notes on how Max runs a short-form production
From your Assistant Editor, Natalia Pérez-González — a couple of ideas that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation ✍️.
Max’s videos are no small undertaking. There are nine people in the credits for his Webby-winning “Long Time.” It takes a clever, solution-oriented approach to logistics and compensation to make everything work. For example:
The historic theater setting Max wanted for “Long Time” would have cost $35,000 to rent in New York. A similar theater in Boston cost only $2,000, so he chose Boston, rented a van, and drove his five-person crew up from the city.
To cover the hotel costs, he lined up a separate deal: a Y Combinator startup had hired him to recreate Margot Robbie's bathtub scene from The Big Short, and Max convinced them to set the shoot in a Boston hotel, which gave the “Long Time” crew free lodging. (This was not a brand deal for distribution on his own channels; this was Max working as a producer.)
Every dollar Dr. Squatch paid him went into the production itself. On set, the director of photography doubled as the editor.
Max keeps a running spreadsheet of roughly 80 rough ideas — observations of tropes, formats, and premises he's seen perform well that could be torqued into something more ambitious.
When working on something new with a collaborator, he’ll send over the spreadsheet, and together they’ll pick a concept to start building from. “Long Time,” for example, starts with a version of a concept you may have seen on your short-form video feed: “i drove 12 hours to surprise my girlfriend and this is how she greets me 😂 “
"If you want something to be sustainable, it has to be something you'd do even if no one was paying you," Max told us. He'd hang out with his friends regardless — the work happens to be the thing they do together.
