There is something compelling about lightning, the sight of massive amounts of electrical energy surging through the sky and powering flux capacitors. Via David Pescovitz, I came across this compilation of lightning videos shot at 1,000 frames per second and set to music. The resulting film called Transient was made by Dustin Farrell who spent the summer traveling 20,000 miles within the US to capture all the strikes.

“Lightning is like a snowflake. Every bolt is different,” Farrell says. “I learned that lightning varies greatly in speed. There are some incredible looking bolts that I captured that didn’t make the cut because even at 1000fps they only lasted for one frame during playback. I also captured some lightning that appear computer generated it lasted so long on the screen.”

Some of the lightning trajectories are quite surprising.