Progress Update and Addressing the Delays

tl;dr The first draft of the new script for Down the Rabbit Hole is completed. Updates will happen every Friday evening until release. I don’t have a release date, but it will take at least another month for everything to be completed.

Long Version:

The first draft of the new video is completed, and the final word count is approximately 50,000. (For reference, this is about as long as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Great Gatsby, or Slaughterhouse Five, though I make no other claims of comparison) Going off of the music runtime so far, the video will likely be about five hours in length. Calling it a “first draft” is also somewhat inaccurate; the majority of my iteration occurs while I’m writing, and so editing mostly entails making minor adjustments to wording to assist flow and comprehension and is a rapid process. I’ve shared pieces of the script to friends and colleagues and have even screened the first rough 2 1/2 hours at EVE Fanfest, and the reception has been almost universally positive, so I’m confident that it, at the very least, will be enjoyable.

But there’s an elephant in the room: the production time for this video has been obscene, as has my reticence to discuss it, and for the past year, this has been my greatest shame. I’ve been hesitant to talk about it even to friends and family, such is the nature of it, but as the people who have supported me all this time, I feel that you deserve to hear at least a piece of it. I’ve waited to explain myself until I could say that I had something at least mostly complete in hand to prove my earnestness.

Down the Rabbit Hole began shortly after I graduated from college. That period of my life was not easy for me, and I did not expect that I would allow myself to live much longer after graduation. It was during what I thought were my twilight months that I made the first episode of Down the Rabbit Hole in three days as a piece for a job application, and while I never heard back from the company, the video did take purchase on YouTube, and so, I threw myself into production of further videos on any topic that fascinated me enough to share it. While they were rudimentary compared to what I produce now with my team, they became the dominant force in my life; quite simply, I had something for which to live.

This mania, however, proved unsustainable after four years of production, and the inevitable burnout began to set in after the production of the Deep Blue video. This burnout was evident in some sophomoric overgeneralizations and errors in my Battle of May Island video, and it carried over into the production of the video about EVE Online.

The effect on the EVE Online script, however, was much more dire. I had promised Crowd Control Productions that I would show the first three hours of my new video there so that I could gather feedback from the most dedicated players, but shortly before I began editing, it was pointed out to me that I relied far too heavily upon a single source to the point that I had unwittingly effected a massive act of plagiarism.

The only reasonable solution was to excise half of what I had written, and the next two months were a scramble to put together something new so that I could have something presentable for Fanfest. I did little other than work during that period, and many of my friends wondered to where I had disappeared.

When I returned from my trip to Iceland, I was demolished. Whenever I attempted to sit down to write the script, the anxiety and private embarrassment borne from my secret act of plagiarism would appear. The majority of this script has been written with trembling hands and a heightened heart rate, and progress was slow due to difficulty focusing. My hands shake now as I write this.

There were interludes where I could write larger bodies of script, and the previous release estimates were based on those periods, but I found that they were unsustainable, and the date continued to be pushed back not due to the scale of the video, but due to my mounting anxiety. As I continued to miss deadlines set for myself, my overwhelming embarrassment precluded any public announcement in my mind, and this increased the anxiety around writing. The feedback loop has persisted until today.

I love making Down the Rabbit Hole and sharing my strange fixations with everyone, and I feel privileged to be able to make a living doing so, which is why I feel further embarrassment even calling my experience a struggle. Historically, I have attempted to separate myself from the work as much as possible when making public statements such as progress updates, and I intend to do so in the future, but in this instance, when I have so egregiously uphold a good standard of transparency, I feel that this more direct address is warranted. I apologize if any of you find my candor too direct.

While writing has been difficult, the other, more mechanical aspects of video creation are mercifully easier, and given the anxiety around the video reception through which I usually narrate and cut together videos, I have no reason to believe that it will slow production from this moment forward.

I neither demand nor expect any sort of reaction from anyone reading this, positive or negative, nor do I mean for it to excuse my lack of transparency. I only hope that, when this is complete, I can give you something that you enjoy. (No more five hours videos for a while after this, though)

-Fredrik