Laurence Roper - Live action combination

For this project I initially went straight to sketchbook work, roughing out ideas for potential animations. Some early concepts include a post-box spitting letters back at people, varying happenings in the ocean, and contorting buildings. I was finding it quite hard to generate ideas at this point so instead of continuing to struggle I went out and searched for interesting places or items and took pictures and videos of any findings. I found this more direct approach substantially more intuitive as I could use the imagery I had gathered as reference to generate ideas with more intent.
Of the imagery I gathered the ones that weren't pre-planned actually had a much greater appeal than those that were based on my initial concepts.

The video I chose to animate was a short clip of a fire door. The idea came from the implication that the fire door is a door made to accommodate fires. The animation I'm working on depicts a fire using the door to exit the building and then swiftly jetting off.

Starting the production of this animation I began hand-drawing a fire animation over the top of the film to ensure it would match up to the camera motion. This worked out quite well, I didn't have any issues making the animation match up fairly well to the film. Having no looped animation probably worked in my favour in this regard as that would have required a different approach to map the motion to the film.
To detail the fire I had initially intended to paint it. Before this however I explored the possibility of using a photograph of fire cut to the shape of my drawn fire. This actually ended up looking quite nice. It doesn't sell a completely realistic aesthetic but is probably more realistic than I would have produced by painting it.
An issue I am yet to address is the fire acting as a light source. In a scene like this the fire should be heavily affecting its surroundings. A possible way to emulate this would be using an effects layer such as overlay to paint in a brighter, orange, glow cast light from the fire. Given the animation isn't intended to look perfectly realistic it may look okay with a more localised glow. Considering the timescale given to produce this animation it might be a push to try and create an entire, convincing, lighting scenario for 25 seconds of animation. Without aiming for this perfect lighting scenario it should still look quite good and effectively fit in to the environment with some rather simplistic lighting effects which may be the way I have to resolve this.