NBCUniversal International Networks (NBCUIN) commissioned Coffee & TV to create the series launch campaign for SYFY UK’s new thriller, Reverie. The series follows Mara Kint (Sarah Shahi), a former hostage negotiator who enters into a virtual reality (VR) world called ‘Reverie’ to save users who are living out their wildest dreams and don’t want to return to reality: they’ve become addicted to VR.

The creative, developed by NBCUIN’s Creative team, required a computer-generated photo-realistic butterfly to fly through a perfect natural world before electrically glitching, falling and smashing into particles. The insect’s wings represent the two worlds the addicted users inhabit: the left wing represents the real world, and the right wing, the VR fantasy, which starts to go wrong.

After Coffee & TV created an animatic pre-visual based on the initial storyboard, the NBCUIN Creative team were able to shoot outdoor scenes and close-ups of leaves to capture the representation of a ‘perfect world.’  Coffee & TV’s Design and Animator teams worked with NBCUIN’s Creative team to compose camera angles, finesse animation and the appearance of the blue Morpho butterfly. To achieve the photo-real look, the butterfly was modelled and textured in ZBrush by Coffee and TV artists then rigged and animated in XSI. The team focussed particularly on the finite details on butterfly’s wings, creating hairs, shimmer on the scales and animating it to realistically flutter through the air.

Coffee & TV’s artists established a complementary workflow between After Effects and Cinema 4D to add the digital glitching on the wing and create a sense of scale to produce the background against the butterfly close-ups. The sequence was pre-graded and then finished with a final grade to enhance the final comped version.

Coffee & TV also produced a series of images for the print artwork. The promo will run on NBCUIN’s SYFY channel this summer to promote the premiere of Reverie.