For modern presentation it is often helpful to underline important points with an animation. In this tutorial you will learn how to stack objects and animate the result. It is like an array modifier with random offset.
A lot has changed since we first published the introduction to the animation nodes. So once again Frederik Steinmetz will explain the installation and basic usage of Jacques Lucke's Animation Nodes Addon for Blender. A tutorial for version 2.8 of Blender can be found here!
François Beaune is the project founder and team leader of Appleseed, which is a render engine that is completely open source like Cycles or Luxrender. Appleseed is MIT-Licensed, which is probably the most liberal license in existance. It is availabe for Maya, Blender, Gaffer and other programs.
When looking for references, textures, backgrounds or just inspiration online, image databases are the way to go. But many sites place restrictive licenses on their images. The most liberal and undoubtly best license is CC0 which allows you to do what you want with the images. We compiled a list of great resources for CC0 images.