FIRE!

I've begun to really like effects animation, and animating fire especially. I've even considered the title 'digital pyrotechnician'. But I don't want to confine myself to just one effect (even though having a niche would be beneficial). Anyways, I animated fire for a few different projects and here's what I learnt from it:

Heart of Stone

The fire effects in this project are entirely secondary, just the fire on the torches (there were effects in the shadowplay flashback scene). I had to match the style of the fire very carefully, since the background art style and the character art style was slightly different (the background is more detailed). Since fire can be considered both a background element and a character, I settled for a moderate amount of details.

While testing out linework colour, I realised it might be best to wait for the finalised background for colour contrast and adjustment (the same is true for the lighting effects too).
Since this project wasn't scheduled to be 100% complete (and the fire effects come after the base animation) I wasn't able to get much done before the deadline, but I plan to recreate this style of fire for the torch scenes.

Sleep Paralysis and You

Here the fire played a more prominent role in the narrative.
I experimented with a lot of effects to create moody, hostile-looking fire, and to save time I generated the sparks and embers using After Effects. This added more atmosphere while also saving time.

I wanted the fire to move almost like it was out to get the main characters while still being elegant and smooth (the practice I got in the 601 module really came in handy!). To save time, I reused a few fire animations and repurposed them for different scenes. In the final edit, I tweaked the colours a bit in the final for a more reddish, omenous glow.

Mythical Deer

The fire in this project was in the form of a magical door and had to match a stopmotion puppet animation which was the most challenging style to match. I aimed to make the fire as close as possible to real fire, with the magical component too.
Matching the fire to the puppet motion was a challenging since you we can't really reshoot the stopmotion animation for clearer, more extreme key poses that would've given the fire a clear cues on how to move. Also there was no physical lighting cue in the stopmtion shot so I had to do it in 2D animation which isn't very believable. However, since the fire was magical, I was able to change the colour of the fire to suit its 'mood', shifting between default orange, to energetic yellow, and dying red.