Secret Level head of studio Christina Lee Storm on AI filmmaking: story still wins, costs are misunderstood, and a major announcement is coming next week

Christina Lee Storm on AI filmmaking

Christina Lee Storm, head of studio at Secret Level, an AI-native film and video production studio, is clear on one thing: the technology conversation is getting ahead of the storytelling one, and that's a problem.

Her central argument is that the quality of the story determines whether an AI-generated film works, not the cost of production or the sophistication of the tools used to make it. She cites Secret Level's own proprietary workflow pipeline as what allows the studio to scale, and pushes back on the tendency to treat budget figures as the defining metric of AI filmmaking. When the Wall Street Journal reported that Hellgrind, premiering at Cannes, cost around $500,000 to make with roughly $400,000 going to AI, Lee Storm's read is that those numbers miss the point. Costs are more complex than a single headline figure, and studios fixating on the budget line rather than the full production picture are getting distracted.

“At Secret Level, we do have our own proprietary workflow pipeline that really allows us to scale, and I think those costs when those get flagged — there are a lot of costs, and I don't think focusing just on the budget captures the bigger thing... When Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy saw the first walk cycle, it changed everything — and that was the birth of computer graphics.”

She draws a direct line from the birth of CGI to where AI filmmaking sits now. Steve "Spaz" Williams, the animator who built the first T-Rex walk cycle for Jurassic Park, had to fight internal resistance before Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy saw it on his screen and changed course. The parallel she's drawing is that AI-native production is the same kind of inflection, not a disruption so much as the next step in a long sequence of technology entering the craft.

On the question of whether cheap, accessible AI tools will produce a wave of independent filmmaking, she's cautiously optimistic. The same way Sundance gave rise to a generation of independent voices, she thinks AI tools could lower the barrier enough for genuinely creative storytellers to surface. The risk is that most people reaching for those tools won't be great storytellers, and that will show.

Secret Level has a major announcement coming the week of May 26. Lee Storm teases the studio's short film The Heist as an example of what the team is capable of, describing the first 30 seconds of footage as the moment she knew the studio had something real.