Down the Rabbit Hole / Fredrik Knudsen

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I was just thinking about Down the Rabbit Hole and how it's felt like forever since there was a new one and I checked Fred's Twitter to see what was up. I appreciate Fred's work ethic and commitment to accuracy, but this EVE documentary taking over a year and apparently getting delayed every month for the last few is just no good for anyone, most of all Fred himself. I really miss the more simple, focused and self contained documentaries like the ones on The Collyer brothers or Henry Darger that where of reasonable length. I'd settle for some side content that was lower effort even... I enjoyed The Warrens, even if Jabroni Mike is useless on his own he had good chemistry with Fred on weird topics.

Smaller doc that come out every 3-4 months is what I would personally like, and I can only hope Fred will not start another year and a half long project after the current EVE one.
I feel like if you know something is going to take forever, maybe just work on a smaller project like a Chris update or something that can be 20 minutes and then get back to work on the big thing so at least your audience doesn't forget you.
 
I feel like if you know something is going to take forever, maybe just work on a smaller project like a Chris update or something that can be 20 minutes and then get back to work on the big thing so at least your audience doesn't forget you.
Releasing it in parts would have also been a good option, specially since the reason he gave about the constant rewrites was so a situation like the Spoony video wouldn't happen again, where he released it and like 2 days later the Channel awesome doc dropped. That way he could keep his channel non dormant and not risk the video becoming outdated, and after all the parts are out then he could make a super compilation out of all of them in one video.
 
Learning how to do media production is great, but not learning to do it efficiently is sad.

Most people who are as gifted at making documentaries would learn how do so with some crunch.

I feel like I can relate a lot to what I imagine what it's like for him to work. Teetering between optimism and being overwhelmed. I wish he learned how to be more efficient.

However, I don't have any insight so who knows. I just wish him the best.
 
Since no one has posted this yet I might as well
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It's interesting how far Fred has come when he started 5 years ago
From his 20 minute doc on Digital Homicide to showing off the first half of a huge project at a con
I wonder what's next for him. An exclusive documentary on some streaming site? More voice acting roles? Who knows
Fun Fact: According to Fred, the Digital Homicide video was created as something to put on his resume. I respect how far he's come.
 
Since nobody seems to have brought this up, Fredrik also does other stuff on different channels - one of them being an ongoing podcast series with this guy called Jabroni Mike where they shoot the shit about all sort of weird stuff (the most recent of them being yesterday). Here's a playlist (crude humor warning).

 
Since nobody seems to have brought this up, Fredrik also does other stuff on different channels - one of them being an ongoing podcast series with this guy called Jabroni Mike where they shoot the shit about all sort of weird stuff (the most recent of them being yesterday). Here's a playlist (crude humor warning).

Jesus that's EFAP level 6.5 hour episodes. Are those actually good or so disjointed that unless someone makes an edit they are unwatchable?
 
Since nobody seems to have brought this up, Fredrik also does other stuff on different channels - one of them being an ongoing podcast series with this guy called Jabroni Mike where they shoot the shit about all sort of weird stuff (the most recent of them being yesterday). Here's a playlist (crude humor warning).

Can't stand Jabroni Mike. I tried. Maybe he got better after their first couple of streams together, but I just found him to be really unfunny and incapable of keeping focused on the nominal topic of the stream. I'm thinking particularly about the Boatmurdered one. It's some of my favorite internet content of all time, but listening to Fred try to get Mike to follow along with the plot and humor when Mike couldn't even tell what he was looking at was painful. And his "hurr hurr suckin dicks" jokes don't come off as jokes after the dozenth time. It's just being a homo on the downlow. Maybe I'm missing something - I do keep hearing people talk about his streams.
 
Can't stand Jabroni Mike. I tried. Maybe he got better after their first couple of streams together, but I just found him to be really unfunny and incapable of keeping focused on the nominal topic of the stream. I'm thinking particularly about the Boatmurdered one. It's some of my favorite internet content of all time, but listening to Fred try to get Mike to follow along with the plot and humor when Mike couldn't even tell what he was looking at was painful. And his "hurr hurr suckin dicks" jokes don't come off as jokes after the dozenth time. It's just being a homo on the downlow. Maybe I'm missing something - I do keep hearing people talk about his streams.
I actually quite like the band Mike is in with his stream buddy Vinny, but yeah, the guy is obnoxious as hell I generally cannot watch any content with him in it.
 
Jesus that's EFAP level 6.5 hour episodes. Are those actually good or so disjointed that unless someone makes an edit they are unwatchable?
Yeah, Mike does tend to ramble a lot.

Can't stand Jabroni Mike. I tried. Maybe he got better after their first couple of streams together, but I just found him to be really unfunny and incapable of keeping focused on the nominal topic of the stream. I'm thinking particularly about the Boatmurdered one. It's some of my favorite internet content of all time, but listening to Fred try to get Mike to follow along with the plot and humor when Mike couldn't even tell what he was looking at was painful. And his "hurr hurr suckin dicks" jokes don't come off as jokes after the dozenth time. It's just being a homo on the downlow. Maybe I'm missing something - I do keep hearing people talk about his streams.
I'm not so sure about the "on the downlow" part, given that he seems to play that up on every stream I've seen.

In any case, here's one of the better ones in my opinion; a reading of the Old Man Henderson story from 4chan's /tg/ board (traditional games). Fredrik pulls off one hell of a Scottish accent, and Mike even gets into it when he's done asking a bunch of questions and acting gay for pay.

 
Speaking of his EVE documentary. I wonder if he'll tackle the rumors about organized crime laundering money via the PLEX system. It's something I heard about alot during my stint in the game around 2008 or so. It made some players unsure of attacking ships carrying massive amounts of PLEX to jita? Which I think was the main trading hub at the time. As they were afraid of getting involved with it.
Also would have been a great rumor to make yourself slightly safer in the grand scheme of things on the world's most autistic spreadsheet simulator
 
I'm not so sure about the "on the downlow" part, given that he seems to play that up on every stream I've seen.

In any case, here's one of the better ones in my opinion; a reading of the Old Man Henderson story from 4chan's /tg/ board (traditional games). Fredrik pulls off one hell of a Scottish accent, and Mike even gets into it when he's done asking a bunch of questions and acting gay for pay.
If he's actually a homo, I missed that. He doesn't otherwise sound like a fag when he talks, but maybe he said something unironically that I missed because I wasn't paying enough attention, or that came out after I stopped listening to their snoozefests. Maybe he's feeling Fred out to see if he's dtf.
 
If he's actually a homo, I missed that. He doesn't otherwise sound like a fag when he talks, but maybe he said something unironically that I missed because I wasn't paying enough attention, or that came out after I stopped listening to their snoozefests. Maybe he's feeling Fred out to see if he's dtf.
Fred (or Frank, depending on the situation) seems to be playing along if nothing else. I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes (I saw what I did there), but maybe it's just an act, idk.
 
Sounds like the upcoming documentary about EVE Online damn near killed Fredrik. Turns out he'd accidentally plagiarised a large chunk of his script on account of relying on too few sources, he had a bit of a breakdown over it and now he's back to work. Estimated running time of the EVE Online documentary is 5 hours.

--

Progress Update and Addressing the Delays (A)

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
 
I have to ask: did anyone want a 5 hour Eve Online documentary? Ignoring the one guy in the back, of course.
 
I have to ask: did anyone want a 5 hour Eve Online documentary? Ignoring the one guy in the back, of course.
It's not really about how people "want" a 5 hour Eve Online video, it's more about Fredrik wanting to make a 5 hour Eve Online video.
 
At least a 2 hour Wings documentary was more interesting than the upcoming 5 hour EVE documentary.
 
That's why it's absolutely retarded to put all your eggs in one basket.

The more sensible and sane thing to do would be just release smaller works while sporadically working on the major work.

Easy to get burnt out when you're working on just one thing for a year.
 
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