heavy and light - experiment

we learned about the presence of weight that a character might have so we started by looking at a heavy character. The sequence was a heavy character jumps off of a board suspended in the air, jumps off and lands on a hard surface below.
As the character is heavy, more energy is needed to lift that character off of the board. we learned that to build up energy in an animation we need a level of anticipation before the actual movement, usually the greater the force needed the longer the anticipation. Also to enhance the forces created we use a technique called 'stretch and squash' giving the simple character life and a more organic appearance.
Whereas, with a light character the forced needed isnt as great so less anticipation is needed.
I found that judging the number of frames for the movement a little tricky, I generally found that i add too many frames as the character fell. This gave the sence of the character floating to the ground and most of the energy had been lost. gladly though, all i had to do to fix this problem was to simply cut out a few frames to bring back the illusion of wieght.
when the character landed i needed to finish the movement and have the character recovering from the fall into a relaxed position. Like the anticipation the grater ther force of the movement the more the character needs to recover. so the heavy character had to battle with the effects of g-force as all the weight is forced downwards due to the sudden stop, whereas, the lighter character hardly recoils and springs back quickly.
I found this activity very usefull and liked the fact that we used simple shapes for characters allowing me to engage with the idea of wieght much easier and will definately help me when i go on to greate much more detailed and anotomic characters.