Crisis Eve was a productive day for film production. I finished revising five shots for the film. In this shot, titled, Burn It Down, i felt the large flames on the boat were not vibrant enough. The timeline for this shot was rather complex. I believe this was one of the earliest flame shots I worked on. The shapes of the flames are hand animated but the interiors of the flames have Fractal noise for texture. I also had hand painted the flames but those paintings seemed rather flat. The paintings were layers on top with the transparency turned way down.
I ended up throwing our many of the hand painted elements and adding techniques I had learned form doing about 30 other flame scenes. I could add fractal noise but when I added a displacement effect it changed the shape of the flames since the animation was a green screen element thus all the pixels were effected.
What I did instead was layer another flame element on top which added more flickering. I experimented with all the layering modes and settled on Linear Dodge. Both fires on the boat are now darker than the torch, but have more interesting and animated textures.
I also animated the cloud of smoke rising from the fire by adding turbulence to it. I added a turbulence adjustment layer to the waves as well which helped bring them to life. If I really wanted to go crazy I could animate the flags waving. I have them moving slightly now using pins to change their shape. The camera zooms in rather quickly into the scene and my assumption is that the flaming torch will catch the eye of the audience. They will not have time to look for the waving flags. Everything else in the scene is in wild motion.
It is very possible I might finish revising the final shots on this Crisis Day. On the list are animating sperm tails and revising the shirt on a guy in the audience early in the film. I might dream up other revisions, but end is in sight.