AI video generation startup Luma is stepping beyond tools and into actual production with a new studio called Innovative Dreams, built in partnership with Wonder Project.
The collaboration is faith-forward, at least to start. The first show is titled “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley, and it’s set to launch this spring on Prime Video.
Real-time “hybrid filmmaking” arrives
Luma says Innovative Dreams is a production services company where filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s team and Luma’s creative technologists team up with studios and directors to “realize ambitious ideas.” The headline promise is that teams won’t just assemble scenes in post-production the way they usually do.
Instead, they’ll collaborate in real time with Luma Agents—handling changes to sets, props, and lighting, plus bringing in footage of human actors.
If you’ve ever watched a set transition—tripods shifting, crew calling out marks—it’s the kind of moment that usually means everyone waits.
Luma’s pitch is that the waiting changes.
Their Agents are framed as end-to-end creative tools across text, image, video, and audio.
And Luma is positioning this as more than speed.
“This is a significant improvement over the current virtual production and performance capture processes where things come together only in post,” the company said.
“This is the leverage of AI — not just faster or cheaper, but better than what came before.”
Faith content, bigger ambition, and a process play
Luma isn’t the only startup moving from software to studios.
Higgsfield last week launched an original series, starting with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, and London-based creative studio Wonder Studios is working on a documentary with Campfire Studios.
Then there’s the broader push from the other side of the AI pipeline: competitor Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela said film studios should take the $100 million they spend on a single film and instead use AI to produce 50 films in order to increase their chances of making a blockbuster.
Luma’s CEO and founder Amit Jain has been making a closely related argument about constraints in Hollywood: soaring production costs, fewer shots at risk, and the idea that generative AI can make filmmaking faster, cheaper, and more efficient without sacrificing quality.
That’s the logic behind the partnership with Wonder Project, which launched in 2023 and is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix executive Kelly Hoogstraten.
Their goal is to serve the faith and values audience globally, and their first project, “House of David,” a Biblical drama series about the life of King David, was released on Amazon Prime in 2025.
What’s interesting—maybe the most “watch this space” part—is how far Innovative Dreams will go beyond Wonder’s remit.
It’s unclear whether the new company will focus solely on religious and faith-based content or expand beyond Wonder’s remit, and Misryoum newsroom reporting has not seen a clarification yet.
In the meantime, Erwin’s pitch in a partnership video is pretty specific: Innovative Dreams will use a new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” process that combines performance capture (the green-screen style popularized by films like “Avatar”) with virtual production (the LED-screen workflow associated with “The Mandalorian”), done live and more cheaply using Luma’s tools.
Under the hood, performance capture means actors perform in a green-screen environment wearing suits and facial markers so their movements and expressions can be digitally captured and turned into animated characters.
Virtual production flips the vibe: actors perform on set in front of massive LED screens while real-time game-engine graphics create the environment around them.
Erwin says their version blends physical and digital worlds during the shoot—then Luma’s tools add another layer: film a human actor anywhere and transport them to a photorealistic scene, and potentially generate a new face so it looks like a completely different person while still mapping onto the actor’s movements and facial expressions.
It all sounds ambitious, and it’s also the kind of workflow that could either tighten production dramatically… or take a while to land in practice.
Either way, spring can’t come soon enough for “The Old Stories: Moses.”
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