Moonrise Kingdom Khaki Scout Treehouse

Wes Anderson’s movies always contain several sets that evoke the beauty and craftsmanship of a well made diorama. I thought that making a diorama of a scene from Moonrise Kingdom would be a nice complement to that idea.

Paper bag, an outdoor craft kit from Micheals, super glue, craft glue, 1/8" basswood, 3/16" wooden dowel.

The most important part of any project is to plan it out. This is based off of the Khaki Scout treehouse from the first 10 minutes of Moonrise Kingdom. The treehouse is comically too tall for anyone to realistically have. I based off the heights for everything off of the height of Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) in reference to the ladder rungs next to him to determine the heights of the trees, the treehouse, the treehouse size and the various other elements in the frame.

The kit came with a grass element which was glued to a paper bag as our base. Once applied it was left to dry for a couple hours while we worked on the trees and shrubs.

We played around with angles and using felt to create the background of the scene. We decided that pulling the felt created a soft enough background. We then glued it and double stacked it.

The trees came with foliage which was then cut in half so that it would have a better approximate height to the scene we were aiming for. We dipped the trees in some orange and maroon foliage to create a more fall like atmosphere.

Based on the height of the tree being 1.5", we knew that 5x that was the height of the tree that the treehouse sat on (7.5"). I decided to increase that by a little bit because I wanted the treehouse to use the rod as support so that it was unlikely to tip over. I laser cut 1.5"x1.5" squares with a 3/16" hole in the middle for the dowel to go through. We super glued the base piece as well as the rod to the grass. Once it was dry and sturdy we started adding the treehouse. It was 7 squares glued on top of each other and then 12 triangles glued to one another to make the top of the treehouse. The ladder was created using wooden coffee stirrers and cutting them into thirds. Those were then glued on in a close to even interval.

The last step was to paint the treehouse as well as the turtle rocks (which was created using some styrofoam from a box). There are a lot of browns (and some yellow) for the painting.

We had to attach some branches with super glue to the top of the treehouse to make it look closer to the scene.