News

Luma AI, a Silicon Valley startup whose backers include Nvidia and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is launching an L.A. studio and appointing two seasoned execs to key roles.

“Dream Lab LA” is Luma’s name for its new operation in the entertainment capital. The company describes it as a “creative engine room” using “frontier” AI technology to propel storytelling of all kinds. Founder and CEO Amit Jain, who spent more than four years at Apple helping develop its Vision Pro headset, among other projects, said Luma will use the new LA base to “build what everyone else is still guessing at.”

Verena Puhm has been named head of the new studio, and Jon Finger has been hired as a creative workflow executive, Luma also announced.

Puhm, an early AI adopter, has created work for CNN, the BBC, Netflix, Red Bull Media, and Leonine Studios. Projects she has led have garnered recognition from Sundance,...

The AI Hollywood race is intensifying as Luma AI, which is behind one of the more novel of a new wave of video generators, says it’s planting a flag in Los Angeles.

The Northern California company is starting Dream Lab LA, a studio space where it hopes to explain its mission to the entertainment business while recruiting and training filmmakers to use its tools. The news is the latest move from what is becoming an onslaught of companies making AI video models (basically, products that let a person create or change a video without staging a physical shoot) into the filmmaking space.

“We need even higher levels of intelligence in creative work, and that’s what Luma is committed to building,” Amit Jain, the company’s CEO, said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

As part of the announcement Luma has hired Verena Puhm, a producer and writer with BBC and CNN credits,...

When OpenAI unveiled technology called Sora last year that lets people instantaneously generate hyper-realistic videos — like a movie trailer of an astronaut traversing a barren desert planet — in response to a text prompt of just a few words, it wasn’t the quality of the footage that caught Hollywood folk off guard as much as the rapid growth of the technology initially thought to be years away from being able to be plugged into the production pipeline.

Questions swirled as studios execs chattered about AI’s place in the entertainment industry: What production processes can it streamline; to what degree can it cut costs; what are the legal and labor guardrails?

Since then, OpenAI has been engaging with studios about Sora, hammering home its applications as it works out kinks with independent filmmakers and undergoes safety testing. Now, the company is pitching Hollywood as it ventures toward widespread adoption of its technology.

Vienna-based Terra Mater Studios, a subsidiary of Red Bull, is developing its first fictional series “Salon of Sugar.”

The historical drama will focus on Berta Zuckerkandl, born in 1864: a writer, journalist and a hostess of an important literary salon in Vienna, frequented by the likes of Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt, director Max Reinhardt or Stefan Zweig.

“Composer Gustav Mahler actually met his wife Alma there,” says producer Nina Steiner, teasing other familiar faces bound to appear in the show, from Freud to Georges Clemenceau. Verena Puhm writes.

According to the makers, by creating an environment where revolutionary ideas and discussions flourished, Berta found herself at the very center of cultural and intellectual evolution during a “transformative” era in European history.

“I was drawn to this story because it encapsulates the timeless struggle for freedom and equality amidst a backdrop of societal change. Berta’s journey embodies the resilience and...