Page Eight: Building Victor's Treehouse

STEP ONE

Do a Google Image search for "tiny treehouse". See all the tiny treehouses? Victor's "mansion" is made up of individual rooms of about this size. 12' X 20'. One is a bathroom. One is a bedroom. One is a sitting room. One is a parlor. One is a dining room. One is a music room. One is a library. One is a laboratory. One an operating theater. One is a ladies powder room. One is Sibley's suite. So, like twelve different "rooms" are scattered about the trunks and canopy of say three large trees. All are connected by spiral staircases. Rope-and-plank bridges. Swinging ropes. Fire poles. A sky-tram on a trolley. Moving staicases. Fire escapes. Steampunk elevators. Rube Goldberg. M. C. Escher.

STEP TWO

Do a Google Image search for "victorian house designer 19th century pattern book plans". Meet George F. Barber, your new best friend. There are a bunch of Dover books by and about George Barber, and other architects and designers of the period. Take a look at Victorian houses. Notice all of the private spaces, especially outdoors, or above the street: balconies, porches, patios, pergolas, cupolas, widow's walks, private perches attached to personal bedrooms, outdoor breezeways connecting upper rooms, etc. George Barber and his fellow travelers are the go-to guys for this sort of stuff.

STEP THREE

Mix and match. Tiny single-purpose rooms scattered among a few trees, connected by every possible way you can imagine. We want to evoke the scattered nature of Victor's genius, the fact that only Victor could possibly build - or live in - a house like this, and the Disney/Pixar/Little Nemo/Airtight Garage spectacle of the moment as a background to this action scene.

STEP FOUR

But how does it play? Actually it's there prominently in the establishing shot, another "aw, cool" moment. Subsequently it's the backdrop to the steampunk kung fu action of Sibley Odenwald doing a flip off a balcony, and Inspector Yi (from Page Four) and Agent Lee (from Page Five - Western Spy) in different costumes than we've seen previously (kinda). And really, it's a giant metaphor for Victor.