AI video generation startup Luma has launched a production company, Innovative Dreams, created in partnership with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and television on Amazon Prime.
The first show in the tie-up is called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley, and will be available on Prime Video this spring.
“Innovative Dreams is a production services company where experienced filmmakers from director John Irwin’s team and Luma’s creative technicians work with great studios and filmmakers to help bring their ambitious ideas to life,” Luma said in a social media post on Thursday.
The company envisions creative teams working with Luma Agent in real time to make changes to sets, props, and lighting, and to bring in footage of human actors. Luma Agent is the company’s recently announced tool designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, images, video, and audio.
“This is a significant improvement over current virtual production and performance capture processes where things only come together in post,” Luma’s post reads. “This is leveraging AI. It’s not just faster and cheaper, it’s better than before.”
Luma isn’t the only startup to move from tools to production. AI startup Higgsfield last week launched an original series starting with 10-minute sci-fi episodes, and London-based creative studio Wonder Studio is working with Campfire Studios to produce a documentary.
The announcement comes the same week that Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and co-CEO of competitor Runway, said movie studios should replace the $100 million they spend on one movie by using AI to make 50 movies to increase their chances of making a blockbuster.
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Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain made a similar argument, telling TechCrunch that rising Hollywood production costs are increasingly constraining film production. He argues that generative AI can make film production faster, cheaper, and more efficient without sacrificing quality.
This idea underpins Luma’s new partnership with Wonder Project.
Launched in 2023, The Wonder Project is run by director Jon Irwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten, with the aim of serving audiences of faiths and values around the world. Their first project, “House of David,” a Biblical drama series about the life of King David, debuted on Amazon Prime in 2025.
It’s unclear whether Innovative Dreams will focus solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder’s remit. TechCrunch asked for clarification.
In a video promoting the partnership, Irwin said Innovative Dreams will employ a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (such as “Avatar”) with virtual production (such as “The Mandalorian”) and do it live and cheaper using Luma’s tools.
Performance capture is a technique in which an actor performs in a green screen environment while wearing a suit and facial markers, allowing the actor’s movements and facial expressions to be digitally captured and transformed into an animated character. In a virtual production, actors perform on set. Often in front of giant LED screens rather than green screens, real-time game engine graphics create the environment around the actors, blending the physical and digital worlds during filming.
Luma’s tools can also be used to capture a human actor anywhere and transfer it into a photorealistic scene, or generate new faces that look like a completely different person but map to the actor’s movements and expressions, Irwin said.
