[lukevanoort]

See if you can load backburner on all the computers that can run it in your school. (Not fast, just run) As long as the hubs/routers/switches don't throw away the packets, depending on the size of your school, you could get a lot of computers, or a few. Lets pretend your animation is 1050 frames (30 second animation, 5 second credits), and you can use 60 total computers, then each computer will only have to render 17.5 frames. Lets say it takes 10 mins to render one frame, that's only 2.92 hours for the whole render, the time would be higher in practice, but still better than one computer, (with those speeds in this hypothetical situation, that'd take over a week of solid processing) and they don't have to be top-of-the-line workstations. (It's essentially the same idea as cluster supercomputing) That should solve render woes, but you need to make sure that your backburner server can handle it. Look at it this way, one nice computer, with Windows 2000/3 server (can be bought at educational discount, or often the school district will already have a volume license) and good render times, instead of using someone's gamer and agonizing for several days.