For the motion studies section of our second semester we are looking into motion and performance and what makes things believable, which involves acting workshops, life drawing and various bizarre workshops.
In today's lecture we looked at stability and your centre of gravity, e.g a big headed small bodied character would not be stable and a really tall character would have a less stable centre of gravity then a shorter stodgier character.
But the main aim of the lesson was to look at weight and inparticular the motions and anticipation involved in a character picking up something which is very heavier, for example a character picking up a small box may be more concerned about how their clothing may get in the way whereas with a heavy objects you will see the character think over how they will go about it, as Richard Williams says its the action that tells us how heavy it is.
Anyway our 'homework' assignment was to animate in any medium a character sizing up and picking up a box. here is my short clip animated in flash so far, however im not quite sure i've quite got the weight reference right yet.
Thanks for watching :)