How do you approach organizing your animation project?

I’ve looked around for information about this, but haven’t found what I’m looking for. The “Behind the Scenes” of the Sintel movie offered some insight, but I thought some of you generous creative types might have some tips for those of us who have the hang of modelling and animating (to some degree) and now want to create more complex animations.

What I’d like to know is how you organize yourself when you undertake a new project.

Of particular interest is the organization of projects with many different rigged characters with different textures, multiple objects and cameras, etc. In Sintel, I saw that they do a lot of blocking with low-poly models and make use of a library, which is interesting, and I imagine every person has his or her own techniques and may make use of various third party tools.

Would any of you be willing to share your organizational strategies, or, perhaps if this has been asked before, direct me to where I might find some more insight? I know trial and error will get me where I want to go, but perhaps this could help with avoiding predictable pitfalls, as other tutorials have.

It would be really neat/helpful/enlightening to see multiple .blend files of various stages of the same work, but I suppose that’s a big ask.

Z