Thanks for the link, Vince. I think that was real. The flashes were sparking. I think the only thing that was added was a sound effect at the end.
You could do something like this with hypervoxels in Lightwave. It would be hard to make it look exactly like that, but you could map the HVs onto a morphing set of points so you could control how they formed and make them look like an alien hatchling, or something equally gross.