I do really like cookies...

Hey dude!

In my view, it's always easier to have a specific goal you're going after, as opposed to trying to "learn blender" as a whole- just cause there's SO much Blender that trying to learn it all could be a really intimidating, off-putting task. I started learning Blender by figuring out how to model a cubic robot toe... then an ankle... then a leg. Always just focusing on small stuff so I wouldn't get overwhelmed. Every time I had to learn how to do something I'd just focus on that and it was a lot more manageable.

Fortunately there are lots of tutorials and stuff online (or so I've heard).

As for live-action; if you have After Effects, that should work GREAT! Blender gives a lot of render options that allow you to render out shadow-passes and such, which work really well combined with live-action stuff.

Getting a good motion tracker, so you can import camera motion data into Blender, is a pretty good idea. We use Syntheyes, a great, solid, relatively cheap piece of software, but there are also other options.

But yeah, man! Good luck to you! Show us what you come up with! :D

Thank you very much! We hope to finish sometime in 2010.