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Instructions

1. In Photoshop (or the graphics editing program of your choice), create a page (640x480 should suffice) of vertical black lines of varying widths and heights (you do want them to all touch the bottom). Add a black rectangle at the bottom if you wish. This will be the base of your fire.
2. Rotate your page 90° counter-clockwise. Use the "Wind" effect and apply a blast or two, blowing from the right. Rotate your picture 90° clockwise, back to it's original position. Save this as a pict file. Call it "fire.pct", or "fuego.pct" if you prefer to work in Spanish. This is what it should look like at the end of Step 2.
3. Open After Effects and import your "fire.pct" file. Place it in a comp size of your choice. I used a 320x240 comp for the sample you can download. You can scale it to whatever size you want. If you leave your file at 100%, it will be close up fire, if you scale it to 20%, the fire will be in the distance. It's your fire, so burn as you will.
4. Apply the "scatter" filter. I set mine at 16.7.
5. Apply a fast blur or gaussian blur (note: the fast blur will render faster, but the gaussian may look cleaner.) I set my blur to high numbers (between 28 and 60) and I varied the blur at several keyframes throughout my comp.
6. Apply a "wave warp". It really looks better if you keep the wave speed below 1. I varied the height and width of the flames and kept the rotation at 90° or -90°. A sine wave is fine. Experiment!
7. Add a fire colored tint. Tint your whites to black, and your blacks to orange or yellow or red. The tint should be 100%. You can use levels here to tweak. Tweak away, it's your fire.
8. Duplicate your layer a couple of times and rescale it and reposition it. A move from right to left could look nice. Use different tints on these layers and move your keyframes for blur and wave warp around. You may want to use the transfer controls on the layers and "screen" them or "lighten" them. You are the artist, man.
9. This is what your final fire could look like.

There are tons of variations on this. Tint, channel mixer, curves, levels, sound effects are good too (You can record your Rice Krispies and a sheet of metal waving in the air. I saw a Foley Effects show at Universal Studios once...)

This idea was from Márcio from Brazil (Thanks Márcio!)