Need either a free tool for creating lightning or free lightning stock footage

[Morne]

High all

I need some lightning animated! Either a script or a avi. I will use this as a projection map in a light. Any thoughts?

[Neilg]

edit: nm. I might be dyslexic, read that as 'lighting'...

You could look for some hd footage on youtube then generate an alpha channel from it - I did this with some fireworks recently and the results were awesome.

spookylights is a good plugin too - i've not used it for lightning but it can apparently do it. http://www.nikclark.com/scripts/pages/spookylights.htm

[Morne]

thanks I kinda need to do this in "5 minutes" and I found that script but looks a bit tricky to figure out in short time. For now I'll use couple if still images and just "flash" them using a standard spots with projection maps. This is for quick drafts. For the final thing I'll hopefully have more time once client sees the idea boss trying to create

[mike_kennedy]

Animated splines some times can pull this off, if you can't use a script, think there area few and a few plugins, then use a couple of them with different branching styles and swap them in and out...