Nice... Welcome to the forums, 'tol... Don't worry, although it's a bit hard to recreate Manila in full 3D, we're into starting this mod one step at a time... You can make billboards in Photoshop, and convert the JPEGs and stuff into GTA-compatible textures... I was planning to make the mod as light on system resources as possible; most of the car mods that you can use for SA are high on polygons, which can bog down your PC, unless if you feed it with more high-end hardware. You can do the intro video if you want to, since you're good at video editing... I'll do some research and minor texture work...
Regarding the tools used in modding, they're all for free, you can get them at the Downloads section...