Vignette of Thoughts

Silence Obsession
It's been a few weeks now--or at least feels like it--since I moved out of my studio space, and I haven't touched my puppet. The reason? My timing of this artistic break fell with the release of Spore's Creature Creator. Since then, I've been unleashing my inner character designer on the program pushing it to the point where I almost broke it this morning when I made a pig with no neck that stood approximately 7 ft. tall (and is probably just as wide). Much to my surprise, the tool is rather powerful, and was able to even second guess a few of the animation quirks I have such as how a two-headed creature I made will look in opposite directions when scanning an area during its idle animation.

Needless to say, this tool has not only satisfied the character designer side of me, but has made me more relax in my creativity. I can literally take a blob, shape it how I feel, and then add parts to create a creature of professional design. If I happen to like the design, I can save it and share it with the rest of the players out there through Spore's official site. The game still has its glitches, but they are very few and mostly concentrated on the website side.

Film Economics
For the last few weekends, the movie house has been really slow. We are hoping that when WALL-E and The Dark Knight come out, business will pick up. With the slow business, however, comes an increase in money talk from the guests who haven't been to the movies in well over a year. Some people wondering why we stop our morning prices after 15:00 when it used to be at 17:00. The most surprising increase in economic worries is the fact that so many people want to use their free passes on movies they cannot use them on.

Naturally, when it is this slow, people are let home early. The first to go are the people popping the popcorn, as there's really no need to have that many people behind the counter when only one of them can handle the day's traffic and still prepare food. Second to go are the ushers, as there's a trickle-down effect with the lack of popcorn being produced. Which means, if you haven't guessed, less messes to clean up. Being in Box Office most of the time, I am the last person to be let go early if possible. More than likely, I will pull a full shift since you can apparently run the Box Office with one person one slow days. Once the night/closing shift employee comes in, I'm cut loose. This doesn't happen often, but for the last few days, I've been let out almost three hours before my shift was scheduled to end because of the night/closing crew showing up.

I guess The President's little talk about how people should continue going to the movies isn't doing anyone any good. Either that or the original theory is right and we just have a lot of movies nobody is interested in seeing.