Locator: 51022B.
A reminder. This link to see staggering wells from over the years.
When you get there, this post will show up at the top, so scroll down through all the "staggering" wells.
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The Book Page
Arrived today: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Michael Ondaatje, c. 2002. Dustcover price: $35. Thriftbooks, $6.75.
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The Book Page
Re-reading. Trying to sort this book out.
Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, Walter Murch, c. March, 2025.
Link here for the notes.
This is the first of three volumes. The author says he has already completed volumes 2 and 3, but they won't be released "until the right time."
Walter Murch is 82 years old. Volume 1 was published when he was 81 years old. Wiki.
Never quit reading. This is truly amazing. On the very first page of this book: "uncanny valley." See wiki. So incredibly relevant at this moment in time.
Murch started compiling notes for this book in 2013 or thereabouts. And now AI.
As related to robotics engineering, robotics professor Masahiro Mori first introduced the concept in 1970 from his book titled Bukimi No Tani, lit. 'uncanny valley phenomenon').
Bukimi no tani was translated literally as uncanny valley in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction written by Jasia Reichardt.
Over time, this translation created an unintended association of the concept to Ernst Jentsch's psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny established in his 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" which was then critiqued and extended in Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny."
Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it becomes almost human, at which point the response quickly becomes strong revulsion.
However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
When plotted on a graph (see above), the reactions are indicated by a steep decrease followed by a steep increase (hence the "valley" part of the name) in the areas where anthropomorphism is closest to reality.