Sensei crawls groggily out from under a shamrock after a 10-day trip to Illinois and Ireland (details later)
Jan Scott Frazier has some very good resources on the web. This one --
http://www.janscottfrazier.com/articles/jobs/index.htm
-- is nominally about the various jobs available in animation but along the way gives excellent info about the stages of production and how the different sketches fit in.
She also did another fine online article --
http://www.ex.org/3.1/10-bts1.html
-- that talks about the not-very-well-understood role of the camera operators who actually take the cels and make them into a moving series of film/video images.
AIC started (but never finished) a very good description of the animation process in English. It does take you up to the storyboard stage and has interesting info on what a series director and an episode director does. You can access the index here:
http://www.aicanime.com/introanime/index.html
Yes, you're entirely free to glom anything off my site, and if you'd like the PowerPoint that I did for Otakon (and which Craig reprised for AX), let me know and I'll upload it to sendspace, which might be more convenient for you than an attachment (it's biggish as a file).
Good luck! I remember something much smaller-scale that I did for the local high school, where I brought one of my cel books that had a bunch of sketches, cels, and original backgrounds from a series of nearby cuts in a CCS episode. We played the scene, then I got out the art that created it, including some of the set-ups that actually had gone under the camera to make the video footage we'd just seen. It was fun, though I suspect some of the kids had trouble believing that it really was the actual production art. ("Don't they keep this kind of material in a studio
vault somewhere?" one asked.)
They do -- it's called "Yahoo Japan."