AI video era startup Luma has launched Progressive Desires, a manufacturing firm inbuilt partnership with Surprise Venture, a streaming service that produces spiritual movies and TV on Amazon Prime.
The tie-up’s first present will likely be referred to as “The Previous Tales: Moses,” starring British actor Ben Kingsley and set to launch this spring on Prime Video.
“Progressive Desires is a manufacturing companies firm the place seasoned filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s workforce and Luma’s inventive technologists work with nice studios and filmmakers to assist them understand formidable concepts,” Luma mentioned Thursday in a social media put up.
The corporate envisages inventive groups collaborating in actual time with Luma Brokers to make modifications to units, props, and lighting, in addition to herald footage of human actors. Luma Brokers are the corporate’s just lately launched instruments designed to deal with end-to-end inventive work throughout textual content, picture, video, and audio.
“This can be a important enchancment over the present digital manufacturing and efficiency seize processes the place issues come collectively solely in put up,” Luma’s put up mentioned. “That is the leverage of AI — not simply sooner or cheaper, however higher than what got here earlier than.”
Luma isn’t the one startup to maneuver from tooling to manufacturing. AI startup Higgsfield final week launched an unique collection, beginning with a 10-minute sci-fi episode, and London-based inventive studio Surprise Studios is engaged on a documentary with Campfire Studios.
The launch comes the identical week that competitor Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela mentioned movie studios ought to take the $100 million they spend on a single movie and as a substitute use AI to supply 50 movies in an effort to enhance their probabilities of making a blockbuster.
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Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has made an analogous case, telling Trendster that Hollywood’s hovering manufacturing prices have made filmmaking more and more constrained. Generative AI, he argues, may make filmmaking sooner, cheaper, and extra environment friendly with out sacrificing high quality.
That pondering underpins Luma’s new partnership with Surprise Venture.
Surprise Venture, launched in 2023, is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix govt Kelly Hoogstraten with the aim of serving the religion and values viewers globally. Their first venture, “Home of David,” a Biblical drama collection in regards to the lifetime of King David, was launched on Amazon Prime in 2025.
It’s unclear whether or not Progressive Desires will focus solely on spiritual and faith-based content material or increase past Surprise’s remit. Trendster has reached out for clarification.
In a video selling the partnership, Erwin mentioned Progressive Desires will use a brand new “real-time hybrid filmmaking” course of that mixes efficiency seize (as in “Avatar”) and digital manufacturing (as in “The Mandalorian”), finished reside and extra cheaply utilizing Luma’s instruments.
Efficiency seize is a way the place actors carry out in a green-screen setting sporting fits and facial markers so their actions and expressions will be digitally captured and become animated characters. Digital manufacturing includes actors acting on set, usually in entrance of large LED screens as a substitute of a inexperienced display screen whereas real-time game-engine graphics create the setting round them, mixing the bodily and digital worlds in the course of the shoot.
Luma’s instruments, Erwin mentioned, permit them to movie a human actor wherever after which transport that to a photorealistic scene, or go even additional by producing a brand new face so it seems like a very completely different individual however nonetheless maps onto the actor’s actions and facial expressions.
