Inside Ryan Trahan's Penny Series

Ryan Trahan. Maybe you’ve heard of him? The burrito slapping, iced coffee drinking, 23-year-old challenge creator recently wrapped a 30-day vlog series during which he traveled from California to North Carolina starting with just a penny.

In order to earn enough money for travel, food, and accommodations, he did odd jobs like selling water bottles on the beach, dog walking, Uber Eats delivery, washing cars, and drawing caricatures of people on the street.

It was all in a quest to deliver one cent to MrBeast and raise $100,000 for Feeding America. He ended up doing that and more.

In addition to the sky-high metrics, Trahan achieved what some are calling YouTube history. “He just gave the entire platform permission to experiment with new formats,” Logan Paul’s former editor, Hayden Hillier-Smith said.

Falling somewhere between MrBeast-sized challenges and Casey Neistat-style vlogs, the series has demonstrated that established creators can go from posting twice a month to once a day and vice versa. It’s also proven audiences have an appetite for appointment-style viewing. The videos have brought fresh air to the challenge genre, which was growing stale from a glut of high-budget, supersized videos.

Trahan didn’t pull it off all on his own, though. His producer, Preston White, and editor, Zach Levet, were by his side working around the clock.

We spoke with Levet five days post-project, at once sleep deprived and energized from the month-long feat. He gave us the scoop on their production schedule, editing in a Sprinter van, and what he learned about storytelling from the series.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’re fresh off a 30-day cross-country trip and video production marathon, with 12-hour editing days. How are you feeling? 

It’s such a relief to be done, but also my brain is so fried I can’t really process what we just did. But it feels really good to feel so much love from the community and see so many people talking so nicely about it. Even Jimmy [MrBeast] posted about it and spoke so nicely about the project. Everything that happened was really inspiring and pretty crazy to see.

What was a day in the life like?

It’d be wake up, edit all day, finish a video. Ryan and I would review it, we’d watch it as a team, we’d post it. And then I’d start the rough cut for the next day and then go to bed.

Every day, I’d have no clue as to how big the edit would be based on their filming. I’d just see how much data I got and when I loaded into the timeline and saw how much raw footage we had, that's when I’d realize how big of a challenge it’d be the next day.

If I got a short recording, I'd be like, “oh, easy day coming, time to relax.” But it was always a surprise, like playing roulette.

When you talked to Colin and Samir, you mentioned making your thumbnails in advance. Did that pay off during production?

That might've been one of the best pieces of planning we did because it really solidified the project.

All of our thumbnails gave us guidance on what we’d do for the day. Sometimes we’d be like, “What are we going to do tomorrow?” Then we’d look at the thumbnail list and be like, “Oh, maybe we can walk a dog tomorrow, or take pictures or wash cars.”

It’s so funny because you look at the thumbnail, Ryan looks so clean with no facial hair and a clean shirt. Meanwhile in the videos, his shirt gets progressively dirty and he grows facial hair. It’s so funny to see how far he devolved.

While Ryan traveled city to city via airplane, you and Preston traveled via Sprinter van. What was that like?

The van was really convenient for being able to edit all day, make some food in there, and get to our next destination.

It was always really intense whenever Ryan would get a flight ‘cause we’re like, “OK. Ryan has a nice day of flying. Meanwhile we have to go drive 16 hours.” It was so funny but so fun. We got the road trip aspect of traveling across America.

How was this editing different from your usual videos, which were twice a month?

Beforehand, we’d usually edit a video for anywhere between four and seven days. I’d just be going HAM for eight-to 10-hour days previously. So it was kinda similar, but somehow, these videos just got done in one day.

Obviously the editing is a lot more minimal [for the vlogs].

Before we focused on cutting out really minor details that only we’d notice and making every little detail perfect versus allowing the content to be naturally what it is.

And it was really interesting to see the appreciation from the audience of just having the content be rather natural, you know. When you only have a day to create something, there's an understanding from the audience that it was made in a day. They really came to love what it is.

It was a little bit more rudimentary than typical editing, but there's something beautiful about that. And the 30-day series in itself is beautiful because everything was made in a day and so you have to appreciate it from that perspective.

Did the feedback from the audience impact your editing?

Yeah, it mostly just gave me a lot of life to see how much people enjoyed the different segments and jokes.

We thought initially that people would just like to watch Ryan make money and progress. But then we had a couple episodes where Ryan was just traveling and very little money was made, and maybe more money was spent. And I was so worried because I felt like that [Ryan’s progress] was why people were coming to watch.

But in reality, so many people mentioned those [simple travel episodes] to be some of their favorite episodes. Even towards the end, when we went to the farm, there were two episodes where almost no money was made. And for a lot of our friends those were some of their favorite episodes ‘cause it was just so sentimental and emotional.

And by the end, I started to enjoy those episodes so much and just take them for what they were.

For instance in episode 28, it was just so nostalgic to be there and to be in this stranger’s house where they invited us in like family.

It was beautiful to try and convey that through the story of the edit and make you almost feel like you were in the house as well with nostalgic music.

What were the non-negotiables of each video?

Integrating the game plan was super critical. It was something that developed naturally as we built the series. Like day four, Ryan said, “I'm gonna do a game plan.” And we were like, “OK, that sounds like fun.”

It just became a critical part of every episode, and it was so fun for the editing because it gave me context for what Ryan was about to do and the value for each piece.

It was also important to state the larger mission, which was to deliver a penny to MrBeast. Otherwise, it would just be a daily vlog of Ryan making money. But when you reemphasize the mission, it gives every piece of the video value and context.

When you started getting cameos from creators like Dylan and Shawn Johnson and Andrew East, how were those coordinated?

Preston was coordinating behind the scenes with them, and Ryan had no clue.

The first time was with Dylan and it wasn't really recorded well because Preston knew generally when they’d come and he updated them on their location throughout the day. But it was a shock to Preston when it actually happened.

If we ever got a Great Reset, we wouldn't tell Ryan because he’d check the donations at night. Sometimes we’d see big donations and Preston and I would go off and talk about it, then we’d wait ‘til the night for Ryan to read it. It was such a shock every time.

Are you missing the Sprinter van?

Being out of the experience, I'm almost sad to not be waking up with the boys and just starting another day.

Like, it's weird that I would wanna go back and just edit day after day, but being able to share such a beautiful experience with my friends and make these videos that are just out of love to rejuvenate people—it's art to us.

We’d watch each video as a team the night before it would go up and we’d just laugh and have so much fun watching it. Just knowing that we could enjoy it was all we needed. So when people were able to enjoy it too, that was just the cherry on top for us.

It was really special for me to see that striving isn't necessarily always the answer. You can do things out of art and out of love and have them work.

Our Take

This video series wasn’t just an achievement of content, but a physical, mental, emotional feat that we all got to enjoy and learn from. It re-emphasizes a truth we sometimes forget these days: that uplifting, humanizing, and just plain joyful content still has a place in our world. How has the penny series inspired you? Let us know in the replies.

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