Environments
Featured Project: Stitch City
Through speculative environmental design, MLL ATELIER creates poetic, story-rich Environments that transcend mere backdrop—each space becomes a character, evoking emotion, revealing lore, and shaping immersive narratives. This concept art fuses light, form, and symbolism to craft visionary worlds for films that awaken the viewer’s imagination and soul, inviting them into realms that feel alive, meaningful, and unforgettable.
Welcome to Stitch City
In a sci-fi world where the planet constantly cracks, cities rise from the terrain as they stitch the gaping subterranean voids together. In this universe, buildings are "sewing machines" that needle their root-like foundations to prevent the planet from impending deconstructive disaster. These Stitch Cities nurture new generations that treasure soil, rock, and all other geological phenomenon.
Stitch Cities grow from the ground-up, inviting citizens to look inward, but also upward into an epic cityscape forged by buildings that "sew" the terrain together with mechanisms that span the subterranean cavities. These underground environmental structures emit their own radiant light as they stitch, digging at each newfound "entrance" that breaks open in the ground.
This planet's network of Stitch Cities opens access into an inner transportation system, where vehicles journey deep inside the planet. This subterranean transportation system helps to predict where next planetary cracks will appear; thus, giving location, size, and speed by which to construct each metropolis.
Stitch Cities keep this planet intact.
Inspiration Board
This is the Inspiration Board for this Stitch City project. These images by other artists helped to set a direction by which to begin sketches for the Creative Ideation Process.
Creative Ideation Sketching Process
During the initial sketching phase, work is done to rapidly generate different environmental design scenarios, each capturing a unique design approach and narrative potential. These strategic concept options allow for swift, insightful decision-making—ensuring the final environmental design emerges as the most evocative and powerful vision.
Other Environments
District 25
An imagined sci-fi architecture that stops time — This environmental design concept depicts a teleport station that stops time so one can travel to far-away galaxies from planet Earth. The teleport station exists within Earth's mountainous region, and its outer space counterpart exists within District 25, a zone that sits outside of earthly time — always in the 25th hour.
In District 25, beyond capsule walls, time stands still as an eternal moment that affects everything, except for one red eternal flower. This bloom grows outside of time, ensuring that true-time always exists.
At this distant place in the cosmos, ocean waves enter into stillness, as the sun and moon share a simultaneous coexistence overhead. During these moments of frozen time, all movement stops. Flora ceases to grow, and fauna hibernates. So, where did all time go? And where is the motion that makes all life possible?
Within the time-bending spaceport on Earth and at District 25, each capsule harnesses time and movement so distant galaxy travel is possible. The station's walls are made of a material that can alter time. Thus, time shrinks and expands within each capsule dependent on one's travel distance.
District 25 awaits.
Dreamland
This snow-covered sci-fi planet, known as Aeris Thal, is a world on the edge of renewal — its atmosphere fragile, its surface blanketed in frost, and its skies alive with energy. Hovering above the northern pole float monumental star-like lightning banks — a network of luminous, metallic, high-tech structures designed to capture and transmute storm lightning energy into Seerium, a newly discovered, ice-blue element that emits radiant earth rings across the land. These rings not only cool the planet’s overheating atmosphere but also give rise to rare Seerium Trees —crystalline lifeforms that shimmer with light and possess an extraordinary ability: when touched, they transport an individual to Dreamland, a parallel dimension where life paths can be rewritten and destinies reborn.
Wind World
Imagine a sci-fi/fantasy world where the wind is the language of its Creator, of its God. The civilization here listens to the wind – to its whistles, howls, and rustling. Every object in the Wind World is made to engage, interact, and harness wind: including chimes that play the wind as choreographed melodic music, or sails that capture wind intermittently by flapping in the air currents to radiate their patterns as musical percussion.
In the Wind World, movement in the air is magical. It is celebrated. And it is honored. Vehicles in the Wind World are fast-moving and fueled by the wind effortlessly so they can glide in any direction. Within the Wind World, latest technology innovations serve as wind buckets used to gather quick-moving air streams. For example, it is the Winged Grand-Organ that flutters to power the flute-like air-thrusting highways. With no soil, no terrain, and with only wind powering this world – citizens feel connected living in direct dialogue with each other through the wind mechanisms they know as their home.
Maria Lorena Lehman has received the above awards and has been seen in the following publications:
