What our 22-second Japan reel got right, and the part that did not work

On Saturday, November 7, my dad posted a short Japan reel on Instagram. It runs about 22 seconds. There are two truck rides, a couple of helmets, and three of my spins at half speed. The clips are from September and October.

By the next morning it had passed 37,000 views. By November 9 it was past 146,000 on Instagram. That is far more than a usual reel of ours gets. People watched about 16 seconds of it on average, and it was shared 626 times. Most of the people who saw it don't follow me yet, so if you came from the reel, hi.

I did the spins. Dad did the edit, and his changes were small. He cut it on his phone from six clips, changed the order, and made the text bigger and red. He thinks it worked because of how it starts. It opens on the helmet, and then it goes into slow motion. Instagram showed that fewer people skipped it in the first seconds than usual for our account.

The part that did not work was the truck ride without the helmets. Dad says that is where people left, and that two truck rides was a bit much. He thinks the reel would have done even better with one.

So we have a rule now. The start of a video has to stop the scroll. A small piece of the highlight goes first, or the crash if I didn't land it. Then one setup per scene. Yes, that means a video might open with me crashing.

A reel like this is not my scorecard, though. That comes later, and it will use the training log, not whichever clips did well.

If you want to see the days around those spins, I wrote them down in what an airbag training day actually looks like. The full record is on my progression page.