Did the movie appear to run backwards to you? Is that because in the first frame the entire block was brightly illuminated, and in the last frame the illumination was weak?
When we filmed the discharge creating the pattern, we expected to see the branches forming frame-by-frame, with secondary branches gradually being added. If that had happened, the images would have become successively brighter.
But the primary discharge happened so, so fast that the very first frame was all white! Most of the pattern was created before a single frame could be taken by the camera, even at 40,500 frames per second. What we saw instead was a first bright frame, and then subsequent frames which grew dimmer as the secondary discharges became weaker.
This is why, perhaps counterintuitively, the movie starts all bright, and ends dim.
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