Director: Rupert Sanders

Production Company: MJZ London

Client: Sky Sports

Locations: London & UK

Location Brief: Major sporting venues around London and everyday locations capturing the anticipation of the new Premier League season

Location Scouting for the Sky Sports Butterflies Commercial

The Sky Sports Butterflies commercial was a brilliantly unusual location brief — finding sporting venues and everyday locations across London and the UK to capture the excitement and anticipation of the first day of the Premier League season.

Working with Director Rupert Sanders and MJZ London, we scouted a wide variety of locations for a film built around one wonderfully simple idea: the butterflies you feel when the football season is about to begin.

Except in this case, the butterflies were real.

Well, thousands of them on screen.

Finding the Locations for Sky Sports Butterflies

The commercial moves between different moments and locations as fans prepare for the return of Premier League football.

Major sporting venues had to sit alongside everyday life, creating the feeling that anticipation for the new season was everywhere.

The location brief therefore wasn’t about finding one spectacular hero location. It was about finding a collection of very different places that could cut together and build the story.

Each location needed to feel recognisable and believable, while also giving Rupert and the creative team the visual space to fill the world with butterflies.

Working with Rupert Sanders and MJZ London

It was great working with Rupert Sanders and MJZ London on the commercial.

Rupert has an extraordinary visual eye, and the concept relied on taking familiar British locations and introducing something completely unexpected into them.

From a location scouting point of view, that made the brief particularly interesting. We were searching for real places and everyday environments, but always having to imagine how they would look once thousands of digital butterflies had arrived.

That’s another part of location scouting I enjoy — looking at what is physically there while trying to imagine the finished frame.

Sky Sports Butterflies TV Commercial

Released ahead of the 2018 Premier League season, Sky Sports Butterflies captured that familiar nervous excitement football fans feel before the first match of a new campaign.

For the locations department, it was a fantastic brief: major sporting venues, everyday British life and thousands of butterflies.

Not something you scout every day.

Here are some of my original location scout photos for the Sky Sports Butterflies TV commercial: