After seeing the movie ‘Amelie Poulain’ I went on to watch every other movie done by the director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. His movies are just so colourful and wonderfully eccentric. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is definitely a favourite of mine. So imagine my delight when I heard my friend, Jennifer Small, was working as a Prop Designer for a new movie by him: The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet .
“T.S. Spivet lives on a ranch in Montana with his mother who is obsessed with the morphology of beetles, his father (a cowboy born a hundred years too late) and his 14 year-old sister who dreams of becoming Miss America. T.S. is a 10 year-old prodigy with a passion for cartography and scientific inventions. One day, he receives an unexpected call from the Smithsonian museum telling him that he is the winner of the very prestigious Baird prize for his discovery of the perpetual motion machine and that he is invited to a reception in his honor where he is expected to give a speech. Without telling anyone, he sets out on a freight train across the U.S.A. to reach Washington DC. There is also Layton, twin brother of T.S., who died in an accident involving a firearm in the family’s barn, which no one ever speaks of. T.S. was with him, measuring the scale of the gunshots for an experiment, and he doesn’t understand what happened.”
Jennifer was creating T.S. Spivet’s mother diary – wow! it was truly a work of art.. Her attention to detail is really remarkable. There were, of course, lots of bugs involved as T.S.’s mother is an entomologist (someone who studies bugs) and she is an avid insect scientist! When Jennifer saw my bugBag she immediately suggested we offer it to the Prop People and see what would happen … and lo and behold! they bought my very first bugBag as it was nicely ‘used’ ! Jennifer said, ‘Well, now you will just have to wait and see if it makes an appearance in the movie….’ I was just so excited that my bugBag was hanging out on a movie set and a movie set of my favourite director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet!!
Then one day I received an email from Jennifer with a cryptic message: Look at that bug to the right of Helene’s head. … What? I was puzzled and peered and then it dawned on me!
