This idea is based on the truth that all football fans get butterflies. Whether it’s anticipation before a match or the excitement of the nail-biting final moments of a big match.

The film features thousands of butterflies as a metaphor to visually represent the excitement and anticipation that fans feel. We cut to different locations around Britain on the first day of the Premier League season, where we see butterflies in place of fans.

Over the action, we hear Sky Sports Commentators talking excitedly about the upcoming season. This commentary is accompanied by the chanting of fans and noises from around the stadiums until it reaches a climatic finale.

The challenge was to bring drama to the iconic sporting locations through the butterfly motif. We meticulously modelled six species of butterflies from real life references.

On set, we shot butterflies to study how they behaved in different lighting conditions. We based our shading and lighting on these, tweaking the patterns of each butterfly to suit the environments, so their presence felt tangible.

The animation was integral to the piece so we created flap cycles from the reference we had captured and from nature documentaries.

We used these animations to drive simulations for the wide shots, making sure each individual butterfly had realistic movement. We also hand animated the foreground butterflies to give us precise control over their position and movement.

We used Maya to build and animate the butterflies, we simulated the large flocks in Houdini and then we rendered through our in-house render procedural in Arnold within Maya.