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

AI video generation startup Luma has launched Innovative Dreams, a production company built in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV on Amazon Prime.

The first show of the tie-up will be called ‘The Old Stories: Moses’, starring British actor Ben Kingsley and launching on Prime Video this spring.

“Innovative Dreams is a production services company where seasoned filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists collaborate with great studios and filmmakers to help them turn ambitious ideas into reality,” Luma said in a statement Thursday. social media message.

The company is considering creative teams working with Luma Agents in real time to make changes to sets, props and lighting, as well as bring in footage of human actors. Luma Agents are the company’s newly launched tools designed to perform end-to-end creative work across text, images, video and audio.

“This is a significant improvement over current virtual production and performance tracking processes, where things only come together after the fact,” Luma’s post said. “This is the leverage of AI – not just faster or cheaper, but also better than before.”

Luma is not the only startup making the transition from tooling to production. AI startup Higgsfield launched one last week original seriesstarting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, and London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is collaborating with Campfire Studios on a documentary.

The launch comes the same week that Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and co-CEO of rival Runway, said movie studios should take the $100 million they spend on one film and instead use AI to produce 50 films to increase their chances of making a blockbuster.

Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has made a similar case, telling TechCrunch that Hollywood’s rising production costs have increasingly restricted filmmaking. Generative AI, he argues, could make filmmaking faster, cheaper and more efficient without sacrificing quality.

That idea underlies Luma’s new collaboration with Wonder Project.

Launching in 2023, Wonder Project is led by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten with the goal of serving audiences of faith and values ​​worldwide. Their first project, ‘House of David’, a biblical drama series about the life of King David, was released on Amazon Prime in 2025.

It’s unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus exclusively on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder. TechCrunch has requested clarification.

In one video To promote the collaboration, Erwin 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”), live and cheaper using Luma’s tools.

Performance capture is a technique in which actors perform in a green-screen environment, wearing suits and facial markings, so that their movements and expressions can be digitally captured and converted into animated characters. In virtual production, actors perform on set, often in front of huge LED screens instead of a green screen, while real-time game engine graphics create the environment around them, blending the physical and digital worlds during the shoot.

With Luma’s tools, Erwin said, they can film a human actor anywhere and then transport it into a photorealistic scene, or go even further by generating a new face so that it looks like a completely different person but still matches the actor’s movements and facial expressions.