So watch this:
15 minutes of video from sped up motion screen grab to show how he created the library in another piece. Didn't seem to take a year or a month, maybe a day.
What some people don't consider is that he can create views and get angles and do this in motion with pulled focus and a whole host of other real world techniques that require huge ass motion controlled cranes, large crews and big budgets. Some scenes I would say actually are not possible or feasible in real life.
Right, there are techniques which can help to quickly model existing buildings. For this particular shot, he went to Google Maps, grabbed a SketchUp model, imported it into 3D Studio MAX, refined some details, copied and pasted a bit to get the empty bookshelves, grabbed some existing textures, layered them in Photoshop, added some ambient occlusion, and refined the look of the whole thing. The movie is sped up, however, and keep in mind that he is only showing the successful part of the process, not all the planning, thinking, failed searches, re-thinking, and so on. The process which he shows in 15 minutes could easily have taken a week, depending on what level of fidelity he eventually wanted, and how many failed ideas he had on the way. It is like showing the 5 minutes of a day-long photo shoot which netted the best shot, without showing everything else that built up to that point. Also keep in mind that if he had been able to do the whole movie at the pace shown in the video, it would have taken him less than a week, but in fact it took a year... Finally, the movie shows only the setting up of the building. There is no knowing how long he took to do the camera motion, falling paper, and so on, which were needed to complete the shot.
And that is only for a building which happens to already exist as a relatively detailed model. That is going to be the case for more famous buildings in certain countries, but not for the new subdivision someone might have to photograph. In other words, this relatively easy path is only available for a few select people. The rest of us have to do much more work to get the same result in a different place.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that he is not going for absolute realism, but rather for a convincing alternate reality with some neat tweaks to make it pop more. Some photo jobs would call for absolute realism, and he would have his work cut out to match that.
By the way, the second half of the movie or so show him setting up a bunch of lighting tweaks for a single shot! He has to repeat much of this work for every shot, so although the modeling work is amortized over big chunks of the movie, a lot of the work is not.
The other thing is cost. To do this he had to take a year off and work on this full-time, probably the kinds of hours that studio-based pros in big cities are used to, i.e. 60-80 hours weeks, if not more (and he sat on his ass in front of a computer the whole time!). The machine(s) necessary and the software involved are not cheap. For a full setup (and I doubt he had everything registered he is using...), this would not be much cheaper than a full MF digital setup including studio lights and so on. This means that going the CG route isn't necessarily going to cost the customer any less...
His shots also show only static objects, and leaves, as well as a few falling papers. Making a realistic CG shot of a human can take weeks or months, where with a camera, you could do it in 1 hour.
On the other hand, he can do things which cannot be done with physical equipment in the real world. He can move the camera places which would cost thousands to do with a real camera, at the click of a mouse. He can change the light however he wants without regards to realism. He can speed up and slow down shots without needing special cameras. And so on. So there are benefits for CG too.
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In the end, some of the things he had to do could be sped up with better software and faster machines, as well as access to large texture and model libraries, but a lot of what he had to do cannot be sped up, and just like in the photography segment, a good director and cinematographer cannot be replaced.
There will always be a need for both. The balance might shift slightly, and companies like RED will have some effect here, but there are many things which are just done better/cheaper/faster/more easily via photography than with CG, just as the opposite is also the case. Take care not to be a specialist in a segment which can easily be replaced with CG though
As for this particular guy, Alex Roman, nothing I have written should denigrate his work in any way: he is obviously extremely talented, hard-working and his vision is top-notch. I am guessing that this movie has guaranteed him a career at the top of his field for the rest of his life. This kind of talent is as hard to find in CG as it is in photography.
