What cuteshoes said.
3D animation is incredibly slow going. Good character modellers are few and far between. I did a degree called Computer Art which focused largely on animation, especially 3D animation and I can tell you that of the sixteen people on the course there were perhaps three good character modellers who had skill. However, that's just character modelling. You still need someone to rig the models (put virtual bones inside) texture and map the models, light the models and then of course animate the models. You also need an army of people to create the world the characters will live in - locations, props, vehicles, trees weather etc. You need more people to light that stuff, you need people who know how virtual cameras work and then, of course, you need someone (and some damn good computers) to actually render the stuff. Since it's not uncommon to render elements separately, (backgrounds, particle effects, shadows and highlights, ray traced elements etc) you may also need someone who can combine those layers in compositing software.
If you approach the right people and are professional about it, you'll find that creative types are always willing to work on extra-credit projects as long as they can get copies for their show reel. They will have their own ideas in mind for their own projects though so convincing them to spend months (yes, months) on yours will be tricky. Cracking the whip and maintaining your control is also going to be difficult. The only way around it is to either convince them through your pitching abilities that this is the project to work on or pay them. I have no idea how much you would pay them except it really shouldn't be by the hour. These kind of projects ave a nasty habit of running long. It should be a set, agreed amount and although it's going to sound anal, the more formal the agreement the better. If you're serious about this, contracts would not be a bad idea and animators won't necessarily mind because it'll give them something to put on their resumes after they graduate.
Now. Unless you've got one character alone on a darkened stage talking, I wouldn't rate your chances of getting 8 mins out. A few reasons with some soul-destroying math...
8 mins is a long time in animation. The best shorts are short. Anything from 30 seconds to maybe two minutes. You have to be economical with this stuff because it is soooo time-consuming. Even just looking at the rendering times. A modest animation might take twenty minutes a frame to render. (And that's being generous. Big effects movies can take hours and hours to render single frames.) So twenty minutes a frame multiplied by 24 frames a second for film equals 480 minutes or 8 hours of solid rendering for one second of your animation. You have 480 seconds in your 8 minute film which adds up to 3840 hours or 160 days of rendering.
If your render times become more complicated then that time can easily double or triple. Hell, if it goes up by one minute (twenty-one minutes a frame) you get 8 more days added on to your render time! And I'm not talking nine-to-five days, I'm talking about twenty four hour blocks where you will have to leave the computer to do its thing without touching it.
So you can see that if it takes three months (again, generous) to create from scratch everything in your story - create the worlds, light and animate everything - you still need 160 days or approx 5 months to render the thing depending on how complicated the render is. That's one computer doing the job. You can bring render times down by rendering on more than one machine or setting up a render farm but this can be complicated and incredibly bureaucratic, especially at universities where the computers are in constant use.
This is why graduate show reels are typically about forty seconds long! Nobody has the time or the resources to pull off big animation projects. It just isn't workable.
To be fair, most student projects will not be this complicated and typical render times may drop to just a couple of minutes a frame but bare in mind this would be the most simplistic, standard animation around with none of the bells and whistles that Toy Story has. And of course, even at 2 minutes a frame, you're still looking at 16 days for 8 minutes. Assuming, of course, the computers don't crash, which they will, and that the render turns out fine first time, which it won't.
The one thing animation companies tell prospective employees when submitting showreels is they'd rather see 30 second of drop-dead, awesome material than three minutes of so-so stuff. I know it's different for you because you want to make a film, you don't want to be an animator but I think the same kind of thing applies. A bad 8 minute film might make an excellent 2 minute film.
Having said all that... you are free to pursue any projects you want and I certainly won't try to stop you. Just wanted to make you aware of some of the difficulties you'll face.
My gut says if you want it 8 minutes long, avoid 3D and do it in flash or after effects as a 2d project. I also think it would be far easier to actually film the thing for yourself with real actors or locations than do it in 3D. If you can do it in one shot, it'll only take eight minutes.
That's real-time rendering.
