Carrara Cafe has a lot of the tutorial links, SciFi Funk has a number of film related tutorials for Carrara.  I would check out the Carrara 3d Magazine C3DE.  Paid tutorials there are several, from Infinit Skills Carrara, Advanced, and Realism Rendering to Mark Bremmers VTC ones Other things can also be adapted.  Books like digital lighting and rendering.  Taking a look at Howiefarkes Carrara Scenes (I think there is a free snow one still available can also help take something apart that gives excellent quality.  There are plug ins some free like yatoon and paid ones Digital Carver Guilds toon pro! (along with many others).  LuxRenderer can be used and there is a nice bridge plugin called  Luxus, its in the process of moving to a new release that will have GPU based rendering and live interactive using LuxCore.  Octain itself can be used. 

I am not sure if I can put links in here to these, if you have problems finding them, PM me.  Here is HowieFarkes Gallery here on Renderosity http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=237321&page=1  though it should be said his scenes are heavy and render time heavy, so keep that in mind if doing a shot with thousands of frames :)

Sony MOvie Studio HD if your on PC for putting together, The ultimate or whatever they are calling it now has a basic version of HitFilm, there is also HitFilm 3 Pro which is a nice package and can take 3d models and use them in video along with tons of effects none of this description does it justice.

if your wanting to do sculpting outside of polygonal modeling, Stu uses 3d-coat and Carrara together quiet a bit, its got a basic version thats reasonable, all the way up to Zbrush.

There are some game related things you might consider such as Source Film Maker, which takes game assets for unity I think and then you can put them into a film studio with lighting and animation in fairly real time.