Butterflies by Coehl, Uniq

The idea started with something that happened on set. Our videographer was filming a picnic scene for Coehl by Uniq when a real butterfly kept flying around the basket. We wondered if it could appear in the next shot as a simple visual continuation, landing beside the butterfly phone case. She was excited by the idea, and that became a small four-to-five-second insert. My job was to create a butterfly that could sit naturally inside her real footage without anyone being able to tell how it got there.

The client was understandably cautious about using generated elements in the footage. The goal was never to make the technology noticeable; it was to preserve the beauty of the original shot and add one detail that brought the product story together. The bar was simple: if you could tell the butterfly was generated, it did not belong in the frame. That was difficult technically too, because most video models want to regenerate the whole image. I had to control the change tightly so only the butterfly moved while the original plate stayed intact.

We started with a character sheet, a lesson carried forward from the consistency work on Best Perfume. Recognition tools helped identify the butterfly as a Golden Birdwing, then I built a reference sheet covering its scale, poses, and colour. We tested LoRAs, but they were better suited to open-source models, so the character sheet became the main consistency tool. I locked the prompts cheaply and at low resolution on liblib.tv before spending on the hero pass, then tested Seedance 2.5, Happy Horse 1.1, and Kling 3 side by side. Seedance was the only one that understood the movement: the butterfly perched, gripped the case, and reacted to her hand instead of looking pasted on. Our videographer graded the plate first, and I generated to match that finished image before making only light adjustments at the end.

The finished shot made it into the final cut, ready to share with Coehl. When the client saw it, they could not tell which butterfly was real. That turned their initial hesitation into excitement and gave us a result that stayed faithful to the footage they had already made. The final pass took about an hour, using five to eight generations with a 30–50% keep rate. It was also much more affordable than the larger platforms: liblib.tv came in at roughly a quarter of the cost for Seedance, with the trade-off that the platform is in Chinese.

Format

4–5s generated insert in a live-action ad

Generations

5–8, 30–50% keep

Timeline

~1 hour

Models

Seedance 2.5 (final), Happy Horse 1.1 and Kling 3 tested

Platform

liblib.tv

Character sheet

@char-COEHL-butterfly-v1

Shoot, edit and grade

our videographer

Status

delivering to client.