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AtLA: Toph earthbending in (almost) every episode (x)

“Love is brightest in the dark”

Sozin's Comet: The Final Battle - July 19, 2008

THE END

Avatar The Last Airbender: July 19, 2008

⚪ White symbolizes treachery, a sinister nature, suspicion of others and the willingness to visit evil deeds upon them.

 🔴Red symbolizes honor, loyalty, heroism. This is the face we show our brothers and sisters. The red is the trust we have for each other, buried in the field of white but always showing through our gaze.

Live-action ATLA series to start filming in Spring 2020, on-location in Vancouver, Canada and Hawaii!

We got some pretty big news today (from an unexpected source)!

The original voice actress of Toph in ATLA, Jessie Flower, was interviewed on a podcast called Wyrd Crafts Chitchat and revealed some big information about the upcoming live-action ATLA series coming to Netflix.

She says/implies this information comes from Bryke themselves, when they caught up in May.

At that time, we got some pretty important information as well: the young characters won’t be aged up! That was reiterated in this new interview, as was the fact that the live-action series is going to have non-whitewashed ethnically accurate casting.

Plus, some huge new information: the series is going to film on location in Canada, starting in Spring 2020!

Here is the quote of what she specifically said: “And I’m pretty sure it’s going to all be done up in Canada. They are going to start filming I think in February. That’s rough but sometime in early 2020 they will get the ball rolling.”

Now, take that date with a grain of salt. Open casting hasn’t even started yet, and a lot could have changed since she talked to them six months ago. But around that time frame sounds right if casting is RIGHT around the corner, so expect an announcement on that any day now if they’re really going to start filming in February.

This also seems to further confirm those big leaks from last month.

Quick recap: photos from a virtual production bid (widely known as a “VFX test”) leaked, along with hearsay from the leaker. The leak turned out to be real, but the scenes filmed weren’t actually from the series. Still, since it was a real bid for Netflix, it seemed likely that what the leaker overheard on set could be real too, and now with Jessie Flower’s information it seems more confirmed.

The leaker said that Netflix is “planning to film most of the show on-location in Vancouver and Hawaii.”

Vancouver lines up with Canada, and the one big thing they can’t really film in Canada is the tropical Fire Nation, which is where Hawaii would come into play. So this is starting to seem very legit.

The other thing the leaker said was that Netflix wants the series “to be their own Game of Thrones.” This would be a really good sign in terms of budget and production size. Filming on-location lines up with this too, because it’s very expensive (as is all the fancy virtual reality and virtual production stuff we’ve been getting so many hints of).

Having such a huge, expensive production also means that we should expect seasons of the show to be released at least one but probably two years apart (much like Netflix’s most expensive show, The Crown).

This means a few things.

Each season’s release is going to be a big event. Whether all the episodes come out at once as is standard for Netflix, or if they come out weekly (fingers crossed!) is still completely up in the air (but assume the former).

The young actors are going to age a lot during the show’s run. If we assume two seasons per ATLA “book” at an average 1.5 years between seasons, that’s 9 years total. They’re probably going to start around the original animated series ages (Aang 12, Katara 14, Sokka 15, Zuko 16) but by the end of the live-action series they’ll be in their 20s. That’s a very different timeline from the original, in which the three seasons literally took place over three seasons– winter, spring, and summer.

But that’s one of the exciting things about this adaptation! There will be necessary differences and that will make the new series its own thing. It sounds like it’s going to be a big, generational story and it’ll be really exciting to see how they do it.