I have spent my winter break doing some freelance animation for Eric Miller Animation Studios. I worked with Eric back at DreamWorks, and he's a great guy who has spent the last few years getting his very own company up and running. He is keeping a very interesting blog about the experience, and if you're interested in the business side of animation and vfx he goes into some great detail.
The project I'm helping on is a web series he's creating to help showcase the company. It's called Bink and features this adorable little alien captured in a testing lab. The team Eric has put together is top-notch, full of folks I know from DreamWorks. Which is to say, it's great to have nice proper rigs, and professional work going into this project. The original animator on this was Jacob Gardner, who's a great guy I worked with as well. He was transitioning from a cycles animator to full time character animator as I was helping out crowds on Shrek 4. Jacob got busy with the Kung Fu Panda 3 crunch, and they needed to bring someone else on board. Luckily it worked out schedule wise for me to join up.
It's been really fun to get some character animation time in. Teaching (and the after effects of moving cross country) took up most of my time in the fall, and I really missed getting to spend some evenings back at the ol' graph editor tweaking animation curves.
