From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Creating lightning bolts

Creating lightning bolts

So, now we're going to give our wizard some lightning. Now an interesting trick here: if you go to the Effects & Presets panel and you do a search on Lightning, there are two different Lightning effects; There is Advanced Lightning and then just regular old Lightning. You can probably tell which one we're going to be using, because the regular Lighting one is in the Obsolete category of Effects. So, it is gone to do Effects home of broken souls there. So, we're going to use Advanced Lightning. So, let's go ahead and right-click in a Timeline panel in a blank spot here. Create a New > Solid, and we'll go ahead and just call this Lightning. Hit OK. Then we'll apply Advanced Lightning to this layer. Now unlike Flare, our Lens Flare, as you can see, Advanced Lightning completely replaces the content, removes whatever content was there, and just shows you the Lightning. So, what we're going to do - there are two effect control points here. There is the starting point and actually you can…

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