Organization is a key element when doing things like this. You are wanting to recruit animators and modelers before a story is even written. If you are going for originality, you will need concept game artist who supply the modelers something to work with. All this stems from the story which is currently not developed or voted on as you say. Here is an idea, recruit your storyline team, pick a game genre, create a story, pick an engine, then recruit concept artist and modelers. That's a better approach imo. I use to be part of a game dev called Project Sylorn (mmo)...great structure, great story, talented team and it still flopped during modeling phase. So good luck to you. If it gets further along, I may offer my modeling skills