AI video creation startup Luma has launched its production company, Innovative Dreams, in collaboration with Wonder Project, a streaming service that produces religious films and TV on Amazon Prime.
The first show from this partnership is called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley, and is scheduled to be released on Prime Video this spring.
“Innovative Dreams is a production services company that helps the seasoned filmmakers of director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technicians work with great studios and filmmakers to bring ambitious ideas to life,” Luma said in a social media post Thursday.
The company envisions creative teams working with Luma Agents in real time to change sets, props, lighting, and pull in footage from human actors. Luma Agents is the company’s recently launched tool designed to handle end-to-end creative tasks across text, images, video, and audio.
“This is a significant improvement over current virtual production and performance capture processes where everything comes together only in post-production,” Luma’s post said. “This is the use of AI. Not only is it faster and cheaper, it’s better than ever before.”
Luma is not the only startup transitioning from tooling to production. AI startup Higgsfield launched an original series last week, starting with 10-minute sci-fi episodes, while London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is producing a documentary with Campfire Studios.
The launch comes the same week that Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-founder and co-CEO of rival Runway, said movie studios should use AI to produce 50 movies instead of spending $100 million on one to increase their chances of producing a blockbuster.
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Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain made a similar case, telling TechCrunch that filmmaking is increasingly constrained by Hollywood’s soaring production costs. He argues that generative AI can make film production faster, cheaper and more efficient without sacrificing quality.
This thinking underpins the new partnership between Luma and Wonder Project.
Launched in 2023, Wonder Project is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten with the goal of serving a global faith and values audience. 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 solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond the scope of Wonder. TechCrunch has reached out for comment.
In a video promoting the partnership, Erwin said Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (like “Avatar”) with virtual production (like “The Mandalorian”) and will be done live and more affordably using Luma’s tools.
Performance capture is a technique where actors wear suits and facial markers and perform in a green screen environment, digitally capturing their movements and expressions and turning them into animated characters. Virtual productions often involve actors performing on set, often in front of giant LED screens instead of green screens, with real-time game engine graphics creating their surroundings, blending the real and digital worlds during filming.
Erwin said Luma’s tools allow you to film a human actor anywhere and then transfer that into photo-realistic footage, or go further by creating a new face that looks like a completely different person but still maps to the actor’s movements and facial expressions.
