Production elements

The elements I need:
-Billy character, rig, texture
-Dragon character, rig, texture
-Forest mattes
-Manual, rigged, textured pages
-Trees
-Well
-Box
-Ingredient bottles
-Final ingredient
-Steam clouds
-Smoke clouds
-Fire
-Bubbling liquid
-Dragon embryo

At this point my focus is animation (it kind of has to be with this story and its two personality-heavy characters), so I don't want to go too heavy on the lighting and texturing. The single light (two if you count the glowing well) helps immensely, but I will still probably want to use mental ray for quick ambient occlusion passes, or maybe even a little global illumination if I decide to change the time of day from dusk to night during the montage sequence. It might be a little too much. I'm still looking for ways to cut back the amount of work, yet every time I start thinking about the project I find myself adding more and more stuff.

Any more suggestions to cut down work are welcome.