This animation started out as a test to construct a building using the hair particle system with only a few low poly construction models. The result was achieved very quickly and I then had the idea of letting a rescue craft fly by and scan for survivors.
Animation in Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 was straight forward with nice features and some bugs as is to be expected from an alpha release.
I also made extensive use of the node compositor to achieve the final visual style.
Rendering speed was pretty decent with about 1m 18s per frame on a borrowed MacBook pro.