[Efalunt]

That's great that your team wants to get started on animation. I'd say the first thing to do is to decide on a rough storyboard, and sketch it out on paper. Don't worry too much about your skill level at this point. It's just the brainstorming stage.

Then make sure you know the basics of the software (basic modeling, materialing, lighting, cameras, and rendering). Once you've done that, go through your plan and decide who is going to model key components (things like buildings, robots, vehicles, furniture, etc). If you come across something that you feel is too complex, try assigning parts of it to multiple people or modify your storyboard to not include it. Once you've got the main models done, work on the lesser models (scenery, etc) and materialing.

I'd say the general rule of thumb for lighting and materialing is to use what looks good and not what's supposed to look good (i.e. if you run through a tutorial and it's not quite what you want, don't be afraid to tweak it). When it comes to setting up cameras in the scene, keep in mind that often times, a stationary camera is far better than a moving camera since it's easier for the viewer to focus on the content. Using two or three cameras at different angles in a scene can also help if you feel a stationary camera is too dull.

Also, leave at least a week for the final render. You'll want time to render it, make modifications, re-render, modify some more, re-render, etc. And if your scene takes 3 hours to render... well you get the idea. Other tips are to use the Make Preview feature and try doing test-renders where you render every 3rd frame and play back the scene at 10 fps, for example.

Most importantly, keep it simple. Simple animations have won in the past since they can get their message across without distractions like cluttered scenes and eye-straining camera movements. Setting deadlines/goals for model/scene completion also helps keep work on track.

Hope that helps a bit.