WORLDBUILDING
Featured Project: Wind World
Through visionary worldbuilding, MLL ATELIER crafts immersive environments that blend poetic storytelling with cinematic design. Each world is meticulously shaped to evoke deep emotional resonance, spark wonder, and expand narrative potential. This unique approach intertwines architecture, nature, and futuristic imagination—creating concept art and design that serve as living, breathing realms within which cinematic experience thrives.
Welcome to Wind World
Imagine a 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.
Creature Concept
This is the Wind World creature called "Cantera" that sings as it soars in air currents.
Creative Ideation Process
During the initial sketching phase, work is done to rapidly generate different worldbuilding scenarios, each capturing a unique design approach and narrative potential. These strategic concept options allow for swift, insightful decision-making—ensuring the final world design emerges as the most evocative and powerful vision.
Other Worlds
District 25
When Earth’s teleportation technology begins tearing holes in time, a lone temporal pilot must journey to District 25 — a realm beyond the clock — to retrieve the one living force that can restart the cosmic pulse: a red eternal flower that grows where time no longer flows..
The Environment
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 is accessed 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.
The Sentinel Robot
Once a service automaton designed to maintain Earth's teleportation hubs, AXIOS-9 was lost in a failed jump and now exists within District 25, evolved beyond its original programming. Reconfigured by the timeless environment, AXIOS-9 has become more aware through stillness, developing its own metaphysical understanding of time. Its form is robotic, but its metallic "skin" now contains crystalline time-networks that pulse faintly in sync with the eternal red flower.
The Vehicle
Called the Aevum Splicer, this vehicle doesn’t move through space in a traditional sense — it moves through time-stills. To operate in a place where nothing flows, the Aevum Splicer creates ripples of micro-time around itself, like a boat gently rocking on a perfectly still lake. These time ripples allow it to "row" through stillness without disrupting the suspended environment.
It’s not for mass travel — it’s a single or dual occupant craft, intended for soul-level missions: delivering memory-seeds, retrieving lost echoes, or reaching the red eternal flower that blooms outside of time. Each journey made with the Aevum Splicer is deeply symbolic and transformational.
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.
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.
The inhabitants of Aeris Thal build their lives around these beacon-like banks and their sacred Seerium fields, tending to them like living temples. Above the oceanic fringes of this world flies Alloy, the last known Pathfinder — a gentle and clever winged creature who navigates by communicating with deep-sea Lanternfish, mapping safe flight corridors between Seerium zones and Dreamland access points. To the people of Aeris Thal, Alloy is more than a creature — he is a guide between realms, a mythic protector of those who journey through Dreamland, and a silent steward of the skies, weaving between the Seerium rings like a living echo of the planet’s healing will.
Maria Lorena Lehman has received the above awards and has been seen in the following publications:
