This is episode 69 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Travis Reynolds is back for the episode we promised: two professional dunkers who have made long-form content essentially our whole careers, making the full case for why every dunker should. This is the practical sequel to the social media episode and the Dennis Yu episode: less theory, more “here is exactly what to do and why almost nobody does it.”
The TV test
Here’s the scene that motivates this whole episode. When the guys came to my house in October (Travis, Ben, Finn, Hunter, CJ), we did what dunkers always do at meetups: put dunk YouTube videos on the TV for hours. And you immediately discover the problem: some of the best dunkers alive are unwatchable, because their entire catalog is fifteen-second reels built around trends, where the dunk you want to see flashes for half a second mid-edit. You cannot put Instagram on the TV. Travis said it perfectly: “I want to watch this guy at his best. Okay. I can’t.” If you don’t make long-form content, the people who care most about your dunking, other dunkers, literally cannot consume it.
What short-form killed: context
Travis’s history lesson hit hard because I lived the tail end of it. In the 2020-era community, before reels conquered everything, people posted carousel dumps from sessions: makes, misses, new-dunk attempts, training clips, rim heights, and cycle status in the caption. You could follow everyone. You knew who was close to their first behind-the-back, who was mid-deload, who was hurt. When somebody hit a milestone, you’d been watching the whole climb. Today the algorithm shows you the trendiest fraction of a flood, captions carry no rim heights and no training context, and even I, a person whose actual job involves watching dunkers, don’t know what most of the community is up to anymore.
And the loss isn’t sentimental; it’s competitive. Watching peers’ full progress is fuel: Travis and Tom Barnes literally raced each other to their first behind-the-back back in the day, and the dunker at your height and vertical who’s suddenly close to a dunk you haven’t tried is the best training stimulus money can’t buy. Travis’s sharpest line of the episode: the community has started competing for views instead of competing to get better at dunking. Long-form is how you compete at dunking in public.
The selfish reasons (community and money)
The altruism aside, here are the self-interested arguments, from our own accounts (Travis sits around 90k per platform, roughly 300k total; I’m around 150k):
- YouTube builds your real community. Instagram followers scroll past you; YouTube subscribers who watch every session genuinely know you. Fifteen seconds of attention versus ten minutes of attention is the difference between an audience and a community, and the community is what buys the program, joins the paid group, and shows up when you launch anything, ever.
- YouTube is the money. I’ll say it as plainly as I’m allowed: of every platform I post on, YouTube is my biggest monthly payout, by far, and essentially the only one that pays meaningfully at all. Yes, monetization takes time. That’s the argument for starting now.
- It’s your archive. Your reels disappear into the feed; your session videos become the permanent record of your career, the thing people (and, per episode 59, Google) can actually find later.
The method: it takes almost zero extra effort
The objection we hear constantly is effort, so here’s the entire workflow, which costs you nearly nothing beyond what you already do:
- Film horizontal (16×9). This is the key trick: a horizontal video converts beautifully to vertical for reels (CapCut: change the project aspect ratio, drop a keyframe on yourself at the start, keep keyframing as you move; my full tutorial is linked in the description), but a vertical video can never become a good horizontal one. Film wide once, publish everywhere. Or just set up a second phone; you’re already filming anyway.
- Edit nothing, basically. My long-form workflow, in full: take the session’s dunks, drop them in the editor in chronological order, completely raw, upload. Travis’s is the same. Austin Burke titles his videos things like “me dunk well, me happy” and they do thousands of views. My latest, a contest video with a short talking bit at the end, did 68,000. The bar is on the floor. Step over it.
- Keep your one secret dunk secret if you must; post everything else. The misses, the attempts, the basics. That’s the content dunkers actually want.
The call-outs (with love)
We named names, because we want this content to exist. Dillan McCarthy: the highest jumper in the world by some counts, 3,000-plus unposted clips, five-hour sessions, and the only long-form video of him on the internet is on Billy’s channel, from a session where he broke his thumb halfway through. The community is begging to watch your full sessions, Dillan. Everyone elite and reel-only: same message. You are sitting on the most rewatchable content in the sport and posting trailers for a movie nobody can see.
One teaser before we go: Travis and I are filming an episode soon on AI-generated dunks, because the day is coming when extraordinary dunk clips will need proof, and we half-seriously concluded that the endgame is livestreaming your sessions. Long-form content, it turns out, may eventually be the authentication layer too. Get the channel started before you need the alibi.
Travis is “Travis Dunks” everywhere; my channels are linked below; the keyframe tutorial is in the description. Upload the session, exactly as it is, this week. Next episode is the biggest announcement in this show’s history. See you there.