An AWS-backed Hollywood startup deploys AI for speed and cost-cutting
At a time when Hollywood is torn between fears of AI stealing jobs and pressure to cut costs, a new breed of hybrid production studio is opening with the latest AI tools.
Innovative Dreams is a new production services company. Amazon Luma, a prolific AI startup that combines Web Services and cameras on a soundstage and a giant LED wall with tools to apply AI from pre-production to shooting to post-production. By combining virtual production, motion capture, and various AI tools including Luma, Google’s Innovative Dreams, which owns Nano Banana and Bytedance’s SeeDream, says this can significantly reduce both costs and time.
“We design and explore the world visually, then we take the footage we filmed and start matching that performance with these digital assets,” CEO Jon Erwin said. “You combine a performance with a piece [digital] Wardrobe you like. What’s great is the actor’s performance, the choice of camera, lens; All of them are successful.” Erwin says this approach combines the traditional filmmaking process with a digital world, rather than replacing cameras and actors with direction.
Innovative Dreams was born from Erwin’s production studio, Wonder Project, after Erwin used artificial intelligence to produce historical scenes in far-flung locations for his biggest show, “House of David.” (The show is available to stream via Amazon Prime Video.) With Innovative Dreams, Erwin is leveraging the potential of AI and virtual production to create movies and shows on a massive scale without ever leaving the soundstage, and he aims to keep production in Southern California.
“This was a game changer at House of David, so we came back from that experience thinking other people might be doing the same thing,” Erwin said. “We quickly realized that people weren’t like that.”
Innovative Dreams director and founder Jon Erwin films CNBC reporter Julia Boorstin on a sound stage in Los Angeles.
The first project to use this new workflow is a three-part series called “The Old Stories: Moses,” starring Ben Kingsley, premiering this spring. Filmed over a week on a virtual stage, the three-episode series shows the actors in 40 locations, with footage from around the world projected onto screens at the production facility. Erwin says a traditional production would take five or six weeks to shoot and wouldn’t have the budget to go to that many locations.
AI video production requires such a large amount of computing capacity that Innovative Dreams brought on AWS as an investor and partner; As part of a broader effort to work with the entertainment industry, AWS is providing cloud and AI infrastructure to power real-time hybrid production tools used on set.
“We’re providing the tools that will allow filmmakers to work in ways they couldn’t before, produce content much faster, much cheaper, and collaborate in ways that accelerate production cycles at scale,” says Samira Bakhtiar, general manager of media, entertainment, gaming and sports at AWS.
Innovative’s other major investor and partner is the artificial intelligence company Luma. Luma, valued at over $4 billion, has a new agent tool that brings together multiple AI rendering services in a collaborative workspace. Erwin also says that they gave feedback to the company.
“By allowing Luma to invest and engage directly with many of these companies and having these collaborative conversations, we are actually able to shape the tools we use in a pretty profound way,” he said.
It took less than an hour for artists at Innovative Dreams to use artificial intelligence to transform CNBC’s Julia Boorstin into a fairy.
But the rise of new AI tools is further fueling concerns about job losses in an already struggling industry. The Covid pandemic brought production to a halt and subsequent writers and actors guild strikes halted production again for months in 2023. Los Angeles County has lost more than 40,000 entertainment jobs since 2022; Manufacturing activity in the city has fallen to its lowest level since 1995. The guilds’ dispute with the studios largely stemmed from actors’ and writers’ concerns about AI jeopardizing their intellectual property and stealing their work.
“This industry has been rocked by one shock after another. Construction, consolidation, cost-cutting, content spending cuts,” said entertainment attorney Jonathan Handel. “Everything is down 25% to 35% compared to pre-COVID.”
But sets, wardrobes and makeup can now be created digitally, raising questions about how the jobs of clients, set designers and makeup artists could potentially be destroyed.
“The question of how many layoffs there will be and how much job growth there will be is not resolved yet and still makes people very nervous,” Handel said.
But Erwin says he doesn’t think Innovative Dreams’ hybrid manufacturing capabilities will accelerate job losses.
“There is an alarming lack of green light, especially in America,” Erwin said. “I think this is a way of allowing us to shoot here again.”
While Erwin suggests that the best industry workers will adapt their skills to this new AI-supported world, Handel states that AI may impact entry-level jobs, shrinking the ramps in what is already a challenging industry. But Erwin is optimistic that AI is a tool that will ensure the industry’s survival.
“I think this is necessary to bring jobs back to Los Angeles,” Erwin said. “We are inventing a new way to fix something that has become unsustainable.”
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