This was done for the Truemax 3d academy in Copenhagen, to be used for promotional purposes (mainly a poster I think).
I used Maya and Mental Ray for the characters, and Photoshop to paint the background and the electricity. It's taken me about a month, although much more if you count the time spent on the lizard and the girl (which were already existing when I got the job). Silly me to not use Zbrush or a displacement map for that lizard skin, but I wanted those very sharp divisions between the scales without getting a super-heavy mesh. (It's actually quite light now.)
WIP thread here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=282607&page=1&pp=15