Attached Link: http://www.asciipr0n.com/4096/rocketmen/index.html

It took me a little over a year and a half to create a 30 minute masterpiece using these little tricks that I wish I had known from the start: (1) Write a script first, and by this I mean a SHOT BY SHOT script describing exactly what you want to occur. This will save you a lot of time when doing dialog and you won't wast time re-rendering scenes over and over again (2) when you write your script, number the scenes in increments of 5 or 10, this will allow you to insert scenes into your script and still have the clips on your harddrive in a meaningful order. Use trailing zeros "scene0001" "scene0010" etc so that your files always show up in the right order in your directories (3) if you have a really important action scene, render a few 'animatics' in wireframe before you commit to a full render. (4) get adobe after effects, and render in layers with targa output of frames, using alpha channels to composite. This way you render the background once, and "actors" , that is anything that's moving, in a separate layer. Renderers dont have to spend as much time drwaing blank pixels, if you are rendering your background for each frame then you are wasting CPU time. This does not work for scenes with complicated camera movement. You can get away with panning across a larger packground plate though. (5) rendering in layers also allows you to add in extra detail by simply adding the part later and rendering it as a separate layer. Handy for re-rendering something that's screwed up without having to re-do full frames (6) animate when awake, render when asleep. Get a bunch of scenes ready to go overnight, and then set them to go while you are asleep and/or at work.