Yeah, I tend to bite more than I can chew, but I still don't want to quit. It doesn't drive me crazy though, just that sometimes I get discouraged by stuff that's not related directly to the process. In example: having a job (doesn't pay much, and I also work as a freelancer, again not earning more than $14 per computer fixed once in a blue moon), my fishkeeping hobby, friends not able to help because they're busy too, or sometimes just stupid stuff such as thinking that it might not turn out as good as I wanted it to, not due to the 3D modeling/animation, but simply because first chapter isn't as good as the rest of them.

Any textures that will be needed the friend that is doing some of the special effects / logos might help with. He's good at painting and creating textures.
I'm already working with lighting, the Solar System vid I was working on a few months ago taught me quite a lot about use of lights, transparency, shadows, glow effects and a bit about texturing (such as arranging textures to coincide with the meshes and look good, especially on the moons that are not spherical in shape).

None of us have any knowledge about MEL / Python scripts. The scripting I was referring to is the kind of scripting you do for a movie. Or something close to that anyway, it's basically the story, simplified into actions. Also the lines for the voice actors.

I didn't say they have to do the motion graphics. They do the rendering. None of them has much (or in some case any) knowledge about Maya at this time. So I'm still the one that has to do most of the 3D-related stuff. Rendering is easy, I can split the frames to be rendered by 3 more people with good pcs and we can have something like a render farm over the internet.

I forgot what composite was, does that mean putting the images together to form the video? I can do that in VDub and then use Sony Vegas for the rest of video editing. Not going back to Adobe After effects, Adobe stuff ticks me off for its huge resource usage and difficulty. That goes for Photoshop too. I'd rather use Corel (although it's not quite as stable, at least I can Ctrl+z to revert many more actions than one and not have to use ctrl+shift+z, and it doesn't use as many resources nor does it take that long to load)

When it comes to sketching, I'd rather use pen and paper (but freaking phone camera will make the image look pretty bad when I transfer it to the pc, this is when a pen and tablet would have been useful for drawing on the pc). On computer, I'd use MO's Autoshapes > Freehand draw, then auto-fill with either textures or creating shades. Or Flash MX Studio, in a similar way and it is easier than MO, but I'm kind of a fan of unconventional methods of doing stuff. Hence the idea of making a comic strip in Microsoft Office Word at some point.