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At a time when Hollywood is torn between fear of artificial intelligence stealing jobs and the pressure to cut costs, a new kind of hybrid production studio is launching with the latest AI tools. Innovative Dreams is a new production services company, backed by Amazon Web Services and Luma, a generative AI startup, that combines cameras and a giant LED wall on a soundstage with tools to apply AI from pre-production, to shooting, into post-production. By combining virtual production, motion capture, and a variety of AI tools including Luma, Google's Nano Banana, and Bytedance's SeeDream, Innovative Dreams says it can significantly cut down both on costs and time. "We visually design and explore the world, then we take the footage that we filmed and start mapping that performance capture to these digital assets," CEO Jon Erwin explained. "You're fusing a performance with a piece of [digital] wardrobe that you like. The cool thing is the actor's performance, the camera, the lens choice– that's all getting through." Erwin says this approach merges a traditional filmmaking process into a digital world, rather than replacing cameras and actors with prompts. Innovative Dreams was born of Erwin's production studio, Wonder Project, after he used AI to produce historical scenes in far-flung locales for its biggest show, “House of David.” (The show is available via Amazon Prime Video.) With Innovative Dreams, Erwin is going all-in on the potential for AI and virtual production to create films and shows with massive scale, without ever leaving a sound stage — and he aims to keep production in Southern California. "It was a game-changer in House of David, so we came back from that experience thinking that other people must have been doing the same thing," Erwin said. "We quickly realized that people weren't."
Director and founder of Innovative Dreams Jon Erwin films CNBC correspondent Julia Boorstin on a soundstage in Los Angeles.
The first project using this new workflow is an upcoming three-part series called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring Ben Kingsley, set to debut this spring. The three-episode series, shot in a single week on the virtual soundstage, shows the actors in 40 locations, by putting footage from around the world into the screens in the production facility. Erwin says it would have taken a traditional production five or six weeks to shoot –and there wouldn't have been the budget to go to so many locations.
AI video generation requires such massive amounts of computing capacity, Innovative Dreams brought on AWS as an investor and partner; AWS provides cloud and AI infrastructure to power the real-time hybrid production tools used on set, part of its broader effort to work with the entertainment industry. "We're providing the … tools that are going to allow for filmmakers to be able to work in ways that they simply couldn't have been able to before and produce content much faster, much cheaper, and collaborate in ways that would accelerate production cycles at scale," says Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of media, entertainment, games and sports at AWS. Innovative's other big investor and partner is AI company Luma. Valued at over $4 billion, Luma has a new agent tool that brings together multiple AI generation services into a collaborative workspace. And Erwin says they're giving feedback to the company. "In allowing Luma to invest and getting directly in touch with a lot of these companies and having these collaborative conversations, we're able to actually shape the tools that we use in a pretty profound way," he said.
It took less than an hour for artists at Innovative Dreams to use AI to transform CNBC's Julia Boorstin into a fairy.