Luma launches AI-powered production studio with faith-focused Wonder Project

AI video production startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a production company created in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces faith-based films and TV shows on Amazon Prime.

The partnership’s first offering will be titled “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley and scheduled for release this spring on Prime Video.

“Innovative Dreams is a production services company where the experienced filmmakers from director John Irwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists work with amazing studios and filmmakers to help them realize ambitious ideas,” Luma said Thursday in Social media sharing.

The company envisions creative teams collaborating in real-time with Luma Agents to make changes to sets, props and lighting, as well as bringing in shots of human actors. Loma’s agents are the company Recently launched tools Designed to handle comprehensive creative work across text, images, video and audio.

“This is a huge improvement over current virtual productions and performance capture processes where things only come together in post,” Loma’s post said. “That’s the impact of AI – not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before.”

Luma isn’t the only startup to move from tools to production. AI startup Higgsfield launched last week The original seriesstarting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode and a creative studio in London Wonder Studios He is working on a documentary with Campfire Studios.

The launch comes in the same week as Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO Cristobal Valenzuela said Movie studios should take the $100 million they spend on one movie and instead use AI to produce 50 movies in order to increase their chances of a blockbuster hit.

Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain made a similar case, telling TechCrunch that Hollywood’s high production costs have made filmmaking increasingly constrained. He believes that generative AI can make filmmaking faster, cheaper and more efficient without sacrificing quality.

This thinking is supported by Luma’s new partnership with the Wonder Project.

Wonder Project, launching in 2023, is led by director John Irwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten with the goal of serving faith and values ​​audiences globally. Their first project, The House of David, a biblical drama series about the life of King David, will be released on Amazon Prime in 2025.

It is unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder’s remit. TechCrunch has reached out for clarification.

In a video To promote the partnership, Irwin said Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (as in “Avatar”) and virtual production (as in “The Mandalorian”), which is done live and at a lower cost using Luma tools.

Performance capture is a technique in which actors perform in a green screen environment wearing suits and facial markers so that their movements and expressions can be digitally captured and transformed into animated characters. Virtual production involves actors performing on set, often in front of huge LED screens rather than green screen while real-time game engine graphics create the environment around them, blending the physical and digital worlds during filming.

Irwin said Loma’s tools allow them to photograph a human actor in any setting and then transfer that to a realistic scene, or go even further by creating a new face so that it looks like a completely different person but still captures the actor’s movements and facial expressions.