The Animedessin extension for Photoshop allowed me to work using its timeline approach as a layer based compositing. So timelines were used as "precomps" to each separate compositing element, from each character parts  and smoke/spark effects to overall lighting and shadows. Used a fast animatic as reference to build up the animated final elements.

A 320 frames animation, 1254 layers were created distributed in 65 timelines and curiously, the psd ended up as a 6.52G file.