030212 - BBC sound bite 2

I've been experimenting with ways to animate candles flickering in Flash. I needed some way to make the flames appear to be moving "randomly" but also is easy and quick to animate. I also didn't want to create a single cycle to repeat for all the candles as I thought this would be too noticeable, so the method needed to be fast enough that I could create several different flames in a short space of time. I took a video of a candle flame for reference, and then went into Flash to animate.

The first try was not very successful; this just involved keyframing each movement, but ended up being too time consuming to do and the resulting movement was too erratic for a candle flame.

The next try involved spacing out a few keyframes, then using a "shape tween" to link each one. This was far more successful as it took significantly less time and the resulting movement is much more what I was going for.

Below you can see the two animation tests I did:

Once I had decided the method I was going to use to animate the flames, I took it into After Effects to try to make it look more like an actual flame and to also incorporate the lighting effects I used in the background. I used a combination of layer masks and track mattes to create the effect you can see below, which I am pretty pleased with (although the end got cut off for some reason):