AI video era startup Luma has launched Modern Goals, a manufacturing firm inbuilt partnership with Surprise Undertaking, a streaming service that produces non secular 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.
“Modern Goals is a manufacturing providers firm the place seasoned filmmakers from director Jon Erwin’s staff and Luma’s inventive technologists work with nice studios and filmmakers to assist them notice bold concepts,” Luma stated Thursday in a social media post.
The corporate envisages inventive groups collaborating in actual time with Luma Brokers to make modifications to units, props, and lighting, in addition to usher in footage of human actors. Luma Brokers are the corporate’s lately launched instruments designed to deal with end-to-end inventive work throughout textual content, picture, video, and audio.
“It is a vital enchancment over the present digital manufacturing and efficiency seize processes the place issues come collectively solely in submit,” Luma’s submit stated. “That is the leverage of AI — not simply quicker 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 original series, 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 stated movie studios ought to take the $100 million they spend on a single movie and as a substitute use AI to provide 50 movies to be able to enhance their probabilities of making a blockbuster.
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Luma founder and CEO Amit Jain has made an identical case, telling TechCrunch that Hollywood’s hovering manufacturing prices have made filmmaking more and more constrained. Generative AI, he argues, might make filmmaking quicker, cheaper, and extra environment friendly with out sacrificing high quality.
That pondering underpins Luma’s new partnership with Surprise Undertaking.
Surprise Undertaking, launched in 2023, is run by director Jon Erwin and former Netflix govt Kelly Hoogstraten with the objective of serving the religion and values viewers globally. Their first undertaking, “Home of David,” a Biblical drama sequence concerning the lifetime of King David, was launched on Amazon Prime in 2025.
It’s unclear whether or not Modern Goals will focus solely on non secular and faith-based content material or increase past Surprise’s remit. TechCrunch has reached out for clarification.
In a video selling the partnership, Erwin stated Modern Goals 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 dwell 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 might be digitally captured and became animated characters. Digital manufacturing entails actors acting on set, usually in entrance of large LED screens as a substitute of a inexperienced display 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 stated, enable 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 appears to be like like a very completely different individual however nonetheless maps onto the actor’s actions and facial expressions.
