Animation: Process & Production - Inspiration

When I thought of using fire as my element, I immediately knew I wanted to tell a story involving humanised fire characters. 
From this, I looked into different animations which have also featured fire that has come to life.


First of all, I began looking at the Fire Princess from Adventure Time and her characteristics. Not really being a fan of the show, I hadn't seen much of her. I had a look online to see how her flames move and how the make it really obvious she's made of fire (apart from knowing her name). 
I saw this clip on YouTube and I really liked the fluidity of the movement of her flames. Like my characters, she has mostly human features but it also clear she is made of fire. I'd like to try my luck at getting a similar fire effect into my animation.
 
I also looked at the way Calcifer (the fire demon) from Howl's Moving Castle moved. The videos pretty low quality as I couldn't find a clip just featuring him but it shows how the Ghibli animators have captured the movements of a real open fire. I think it would be a nice touch to have my characters flames be like this but it'll probably be quite time consuming.
Looking at real-life fire clips has also been useful in grasping the ways fire moves, but I'm not really keen on the idea of having my animation realistic (as the story itself isn't!).

I recently had a crit on my work, showing my initial ideas, my animatic and where I am with my project. I don't really know how the idea went down as a whole. Some people seemed to quite like it whereas others looked a bit blank. It was the reaction I was expecting as I, myself aren't 100% on the idea unfortunately. I didn't receive much feedback, just in future do an animatic in the correct way (I did gifs and put them into a powerpoint, probably couldn't have done it more wrong if I tried) and perhaps make the characters flames move - which I intend to do anyway. I like the idea of having crits however - I think the constructive criticism helps you identify things in your work that perhaps you didn't even notice.