Light Night //1 second animation brief ''WE ARE UNIVERSE'' Part 1

For this brief I was asked to produce a 1 second animation featuring one of these 5 themes; Earth, Wind, Fire, Air and Astronomical. The animation I would produce would be combined with other artists animations, looped and projected onto our university building down in the city centre at Leeds Light Night show. 

GIF taken from the sequence

I began by working out which word I'd like to represent my theme and I ended up selecting Fire, because I was really 'drawn' to the element. I'd animated fire before in my first year of study, for a test animation and my first animated film ' putting out' - which featured a woman made of fire. I've always been drawn to animating fire, ever since I saw the animated fire sequence in Disneys 'Hunchback of notre dame'. The sequence featured the villains sexual desires for a character represented within the flames of a fireplace, the character he fantasies about is dancer herself so the movement of flame worked perfectly to represent her characteristic movements.

In the brief it mentioned making the animation as contrasting as possible, so I decided to select a colour pallet first. I had in mind to make the colours 'flame like' to begin with, but thinking about having them projected up onto buildings and guessing the colours would most likely be muted (possibly) by the buildings texture or the projectors lighting; I settled on colours I'm naturally attracted to... Here's a quick colour swatch I did below, baring in mind I wasn't sure what I planning on animating. 

I want to play around with the idea of fire and whilst researching flame reference videos and photos I saw a certain heat of fire is a purple blueish shade. I'm planning on playing around with the fire of purple/pink flame.

I've always been attracted to the idea of animating a character as fluid as flame, so I'm leaning towards animating a figure: I want this animation to feel warm and comforting, because that was the idea of a flame is to me. I don't want to approach the element as dangerous or risky or even sexual, I want this animation to be charming and only perhaps a TINY BIT uncomfortable.