Have you ever wanted to make an energy blast like the kind you see in games like Dragon Ball Z? Yeah, me neither. But if you’re under the age of 24 and this sounds like fun to you, I found a 17 minute tutorial on You Tube that shows you how to achieve the same look and feel. It uses After Effects and Trapcode’s Shine plugin to pull off the effect.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/x9tc48FR9Tw" width="415" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

It’s hard to see some of the specific settings used in the dialog boxes because of the small size and compression, but if you’re at all familiar with AE, you shouldn’t have any trouble following along.