A small midge flew into Curtis' eye while we were shooting the last scene of "The Thing Is All Around Itself", putting an end to our filming process. We decided to honour the fly's interruption and self-sacrifice by encasing it in gold, using a microscopy specimen preparation technique called gold sputtering Gold sputtering involves coating organic specimens in a thin layer of gold prior to the high resolution imaging of SEM. After this the material specimens are usually discarded because the image data they produce is considered more valuable to science than the bodies themselves. Instead of completing this process, we removed and preserved our fly at the gold-sputter stage. 

With thanks to Steve Barlow and the San Diego State University EM Facility.