I had an idea for this some time ago and decided to put it together. I know how some of this stuff is suppose to work in theory, but don't really have a excuse to try it out. So I thought I would do a test animation as a sort of "proof of concept".

The model and set are pretty simple. Just a cube and some planes with the vectors jittered around. Background, lights, etc.

After that I did a quick (and admittedly kind of sloppy) lightening effect in flash. I exported them as a series of images and scaled them in photoshop. Then placed them as Transparency Maps in the shader and set the "use Image sequence". I got the more realistic Lightening effect by using a Surface Shader to get the glow on it.