11 Second Club - May Submission

This is my submission for this month's 11 Second Club competition. I kept having problems with the shadows when I rendered this, but I'm hoping they will look past that and focus on the animation, but I will still try to render the scene again if I have time.

Other then that, I put extra effort into making my characters show more body language and facial motion, to properly convey the dialogue. I feel this finally shows the improvements I have done since November, when I decided to focus on becoming a 3D character animator. Following the advices from my mentor, I made sure the audience knew who/what the characters was talking to, and made the dialogue very clear to understand. I acted out all the dialogue in the audio clip and made notes of what both characters are doing, and how to progress from one motion to another without breaking the flow or making the motions stiff.
That helped me a lot to plan out the scene, because most of all I want to catch the audience attention and get them interested in the exchange of words between those characters, which won't happen if you don't find the animation fun or compelling to watch.

To get a proper portrait of how the old man should react to the woman, I filmed myself mouthing the dialogue and acting out how he would behave. Took a lot of takes, but I liked this one the best.

It worked as a excellent reference material, and it helped me a lot to improve my animation.