'So Long' began as a rumination on what it might feel like to live in a world where brain machine interfaces had been rolled out using the same commercial strategies as social media platforms and other surveillance capitalist systems. As the film was developed, the problem of representation presented itself: how much has science fiction in the film industry contributed to the development of this technology? Is our dystopia in fact prototyped, tested and normalised in the auditorium? Further: how much could it be said that animation technology itself has simply evolved into these surveillance systems, with the datasets gathered by them as 'intelligence' leading inevitably to the A.I. age? What it meant to make a film about the future changed as the process went on. It began to avoid depicting anything except itself. Was it in fact an automated process? Who or what is the voice we hear - is it just another artifact of the records, or a product generated from it? All concept of truth and understanding in this world becomes entirely self-reflexive and thus self-destructive. Maybe the necessary escape route will be one that we do not have control over.