Fire beam

After I was done with the previous animation, I went onto doing the flame beam for that animation. I wanted it to be on a different document because then the designer could make it attack or spawn in, plus he would have more control if the animation was done on a separate document.
For making the beam I made a pencil/ charcoal brush which had a grunge feel to it; I held shift and drew two straight lines for the edge of the beams, then for the inside colour I made it orange and added lines that were yellow, then I used the effect gaussian blur on the yellow lines layer which then was duplicated and set to overlay mode. I did a few more layers until I got something that I wanted. Finally, for animating it I basically had it come out of the frame to when it was fully visible.

to make it feel more alive and blazing I made one of the layers with the lines on to move around when the whole flame beam was in frame.