Monsters on the Mind

The Prince: Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts -

Enchantress:

The race to build the world’s tallest skyscraper has reached new heights - and taken a turn in direction.

Designs for ‘The Big Bend’, a slender tower that would transform Manhattan’s skyline have been unveiled.

Described as the ‘longest building in the world’, the project’s concept drawings reveal a skyscraper reaching an apex then curving back down. And featuring an elevator system that can travel in curves, horizontally and in loops.

In a bid to work around the challenges of New York’s zoning laws, design studio Oiio has imagined an innovative concept to straddle across Billionnaire’s Row on 57th Street.

The head writer and a director of Avatar: The Last Airbender are making a new Netflix Original animated series

Aaron Ehasz, the head writer of ATLA, has started a new production company called Wonderstorm that is producing a new, original animated series for Netflix in conjunction with a AAA video game in the same universe, unrelated to the Avatar universe.

He is being joined by Giancarlo Volpe (Twitter, Tumblr), one of ATLA’s main directors who has also worked on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil.

At the moment, Wonderstorm looks like a team of ten, among them: it was co-founded with Justin Richmond (an Uncharted director) and Justin Santistevan from Riot Games, where Ehasz worked from 2012-2015 as a creative director for League of Legends (and Volpe worked as a director for animated content). Aaron Ehasz has also been a writer on Futurama.

This résumé of worldbuilding-heavy TV series and video games looks like it’s the crux of what Wonderstorm’s goals are all about: creating a new fictional world (or worlds?) with deep and broad lore and building a franchise from that across different forms of media, integrated with one another more than you might typically see. Currently it sounds like they’re working on one main original scifi or fantasy universe, with a video game and Netflix Original animated series on the way, and it sounds like from the ground-up they’re focusing on having the show and game coexist meaningfully. Pretty cool!

They’re aiming for a late 2018 release.

Their website is now live, at:

wonderstorm.net

It features some really cool artwork giving us ice and fire vibes: