After a little garage prologue with Janis and Damien, the new Mean Girls movie opens in Kenya (as opposed to unspecified “Africa” like in the 2004 version). In the opening musical number Cady runs through her home: the tent she shares with her mom presumably on the plains of Kenya (or New Jersey).
A tent that looks like the kind of tents for safaris in Kenya, but not a glamping luxury tent, and fits the spacial needs of filming does not exist.
We had to have it custom made and shepherding the birth of this custom tent is something I worked on for almost the whole time up until shooting!
I wish I had some stills from this scene in the movie but alas they are not in any of the trailers.
I learned a ton about the safari and custom canvas tent industry and how there are actually a few companies in Kenya and South Africa that will custom make and ship to you!
International shipping is always a gamble with hard shooting timelines that are short, so fortunately in the end we found a vendor in America who was perfect.
When we were working out the needs and possibilities of the tent. That post-it was the planned choreography, and we made little origami tents to discuss the options.
We asked for huge skylights for ease of lighting and shooting, and after building our custom tent for the first time, we had some add on requests.
One of them was an add on divider in this very specific dimension. The idea was so unfunctional for most tent customers that the vendor had no idea what I meant until we drew this little scribble over the photo.
Cady’s mom is a research zoologist, so we had to imagine a field research tent that a professional scientist lives and works out of as well as shares with her daughter.
We tried to think very hard (and do lots of research!) about what those details would look like for her desk and I think Jess did an amazing job. I just contributed research and finishing details to this portion of the set.
Since this movie version of Mean Girls locates Cady and her mom specifically in Kenya, we were thinking of ways to reflect the specificity of Kenya in the items in the tent, and one of course is food. The other is textiles and we do have a quite a few specific Kenyan textiles in the tent but lets stay focused on the food.
So I visited small African food groceries, which in New Jersey primarily cater to immigrants from West Africa and nothing specifically from Kenya. Though when I saw British food products that are popular in the post-colonial British empire world, I picked up a few of those items.
And that’s how I found myself one early morning at the warehouse of a specialty African importer (photo below).
After doing lots of research (I was trolling through the Carrefour Kenya website), I figured the specifically Kenyan, made in Kenya, food item that was most visually clear and which made sense for someone to store in a tent were these Kenylon brand Njahi beans.
YAY!
oh wait, but how am I going to find them in America? The warehouse I visited were out of stock on this particular moment at the time!!!!!!!!!!
So after a lot of calling around and googling, I found an importer in Maryland who shipped them to me in time, they made them into the set, and you know what? THEY MADE THEM ON SCREEN!
In the first 5 min of the film, if you are paying close attention when Cady is singing and running through her tent you will see the Kenylon Njahi Beans on screen! If you are me (or maybe now you after reading this) you will yelp for joy and triumph for a can of just the right beans detail to locate Cady and her mom in Kenya in the background.
