fx supervisors as designers

It occurred to me that one thing I'm doing for this project is serving as vfx supervisor. From the little I know, it seems that fx supervisors are really like designers in the same way that production designers are designers. They think about looks and approaches but don't necessarily do all the work. I think that's why the bird-into-planes animation was intriguing enough to engage several minds simultaneously. As designers, we're trying to think of the best way to solve the problem. What's interesting about Ben's approach is that it's theoretically possible but not practically possible. Yes, I knew it was possible to find videos of birds and planes. The problem is finding videos that function as plates—with the right bird flying the right way totally isolated and easy to key. Still, before long it will be possible to follow Ben's approach. The information is there in the video. There just needs to be some inexpensive software that extracts and stabilizes the image, interpolates missing areas (or allows you to do so) and creates an animated and textured 3D model from the data. In the end, it's interesting that for this one animation we came up with three different approaches: Ben's (stitch together videos), Craig's (morph-animate still images) and mine (use 2.5 D images and a simple dissolve).