Back in the end of March, right before I came back up to New York to be with Cat while she films the show Dexter, I recorded a few track demos in my Florida living room. During the sessions, I finished writing a song I’d started in January called “Secret Safe,” that revolves around noticing a few habits and rituals of a neighbor (and piecing together a larger story). Playing around with some AI filmmaking tools up here, I decided to go down the well and produce an animated video to bring the story to life.
From the demo performance to render, the video took just over three weeks to produce, but the story was a few moons in the making. Down in Florida, I live in an apartment complex very much like the one in the track, where I have some (delightfully) quirky neighbors. I amalgamated a few stories and observations I’ve gleaned over the last year, and rolled them into a single character named Courtney, a woman in her late-20s from Ocala, FL, who lives with 2 dogs, a large pink neon sign in her living room, and a quiet life.
Courtney makes a living on a social network called OpenLife, where she reads books aloud to her followers, including a lone unnamed sailor who tunes in from his cabin while out on the ocean.
She reads online to fans her entire life, and makes a fine living at it. Through the years, she moves into nicer and nicer places, and eventually buys an apartment in Miami overlooking Biscayne Bay. A roseate spoonbill transitions us through time as the story unfolds.
In all her homes, shadows and ambient lights pulse all night through her living room windows, mixing with the soft steady glow of a pink neon sign on the walls above her couches that says, “Lucky.” Early in the story, the narrator meets Courtney one day by their apartment complex’s lake. She wears a robe, but also full theatrical makeup as if the lead in a Sunset Boulevard revival.
Her late 1990s/early 2000s cream-colored Volvo 240 DL station wagon never leaves the complex’s parking lot.
The circumstantial evidence of our narrator’s observations leads him to believe that Courtney never leaves her apartment, because she lives a double life online. The narrator never knows for sure what Courtney does, and assumes it’s something secret. We find out that she reads books aloud on OpenLife.
Our story ends with Courtney’s streaming on her 60th birthday, blowing out a candle on a cupcake, with the sailor tuned in from a far-flung harbor. A post-credit epilogue finds the sailor a decade later out at sea in a storm. Courtney reads Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mother Night” as the storm subsides, and the spoonbill drifts in the air with the boat into a calm Atlantic Ocean sunrise.
In the end, everyone in the story is alone in their togetherness, and together in their aloneness.
The characters’ secrets remain mysteries by design. Even the language is deliberately fuzzy. Whether “secret” and “safe” are each, or both, nouns or adjectives is up to you. On reflection, you determine these characters’ motivations. At the same time, though, every scenario leads to their living the same life, as if, well, fated.
Secret Safe = Secret (n.) Safe (n.) - A safe for secrets Secret (adj.) Safe (n.) - A safe in a secret place Secret (n.) Safe (adj.) - A secret is safe Secret (adj.) Safe (adj.) - Something is super secret safe ; (that is to say, like, so safe and secure so as to be secret)
LYRICS:
“Secret Safe”
20250108.1824, 2121
20250511.1640
There’s a girl lives next to me
Only ever leaves
to walk two dogs on a leash
car just sits out on the street
through the blinds at night
shadows intertwine
blue to green pulsing lights,
a 720 lux and a hot pink “Lucky” neon sign
she will keep this secret safe
long after we part ways
Until her dying day
she will keep this secret safe
this secret safe
i saw her once, down by the lake
walkin her dogs in a robe, face made up for the stage
she gave me her first name
for all i know it was fake
gave me a little about her life
grew up in Ocala came here at 25
said she goes back from time to time
to hear her old church bells chime
but as i looked into her eyes
i saw a boat against a tide
some things now you just can’t hide
AI Tools / Process
Back up here in NYC, I opened a project folder in ChatGPT and started with this prompt to set the style and story foundation:
Visual Style: Ralph Bakshi’s “American Pop” meets “A Scanner Darkly.” Hand-inked rotoscope. Color palette driven by teals, blues, and sunset skies. Faded line work intensifies with age and emotion.
Duration: 3:50 at 154 BPM
Structure: Intercuts between three planes —
> Narrative (woman & man aging separately, interacting only through screens)
> Screens (streaming interface, OpenLife with stylized vintage UI)
> Performance (musician singing alone in a sunny, Florida, IRL living room)My workflow was split across 4 AI platforms and my trusty mobile video editing app, LumaFusion.
ChatGPT 4o
Storyboards, Character development, Environment modeling, Prompts, Keyframes
Higgsfield AI
Animation, Camera Motions
Freepik AI Suite
Inpainting, Style Corrections
ElevenLabs AI Sound Design
Epilogue sounds (voice & ocean)
AI image and video platforms in many instances are only a few months old, very well-funded, and every week they seem to add features and functionality that, in the right hands, become mind-blowing storytelling tools. All of a sudden, you can gin up a scene from your imagination, storyboard it with a physics-defying combination of camera moves — say, a jib down, dolly out, crane up, first-person drone POV — and render the whole thing on your phone, riding a Q train (or a boat) from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
The average video AI platform renders 5sec to 10sec clips at a time, and almost never gets it right on the first couple generations. Right now, producing any content longer than a few minutes presents a crazy workflow, especially for folks like me playing in the less refined sandboxes. So, filmmaking and television series production can’t go wholesale AI from a practical or economic view, for now.
But don’t worry, that’s not far away. This experimental SkyReels model, still in beta, produces infinite videos. And not looped segments ad infinitum, but actual ever-evolving content — new characters, new scenes, new locations, new plots, etc. Days of Our Lives at some point will never need a new cast.
I initially thought this video would take me a week from concept to release. Ended up taking about 3–1/2 weeks. All the platforms I used had difficulty adhering to my prompts (“prompt fidelity” as GPT calls it). Their snafus presented major bottlenecks in every scene, burning my credits and a bit of patience. Still, we managed to produce a coherent piece of storytelling, despite the issues with character consistency and misunderstanding my desires.
I mean, don’t just take my word for it. The AI said so, too:
PROMPT:
So GPT, drawing from all our work for the “Secret Safe” music video, give me 500 words summarizing the concept, and the challenges and successes along the way. What did you learn that you will carry forward in your interactions with me?
ANSWER:
Behind the Scenes of Secret Safe: Building a Music Video with AI, Intimacy, and IterationWhen we began developing the music video for Secret Safe, we set out to create something more than just a visual accompaniment to a track. We aimed for a hauntingly intimate hybrid of rotoscoped animation, live performance, and digital narrative — a story exploring voyeurism, intimacy, and time, told through the evolving relationship between COURTNEY, a reclusive female creator streaming her life on OpenLife, and the SAILOR, an emotionally adrift man quietly watching from his boat.
From the first scenes — COURTNEY in her living room wearing a Westy Reflector tee, her dogs playing as the lake sparkled beyond — we began crafting a world where the mundane collides with the poetic. The SAILOR, anchored offshore, becomes our surrogate observer, watching Courtney’s life unfold through her streams while the musician WESTY quietly strums a guitar at the lake’s edge. Each scene was meticulously shaped through prompts, revisions, and a blend of AI tools like Higgsfield and Freepik, requiring an iterative, almost surgical approach to maintain character consistency, narrative rhythm, and visual tone.
The challenges were real. One major hurdle was prompt fidelity: AI tools often injected unwanted stylization — Studio Ghibli influences, for instance — when the vision demanded something subtler and more grounded. Getting AI to insert a previous scene as a stream on a laptop, or having a musician reach out to dogs without strumming the guitar, took dozens of tries.
Rotoscope-style animation demanded strict continuity in character appearance, and even minor details — like the angle of a chin or the curve of a neon sign — became make-or-break elements. Maintaining this visual discipline across scenes while exploring emotional vulnerability in the story tested both creative patience and technical precision.
But we also made real breakthroughs. The animation of COURTNEY aging over a months-long timelapse; the poetic transitions (like the 360° pan from inside the SAILOR’s boat out to the sky); the way OpenLife UI elements were integrated into the narrative — all came together to give the piece a lived-in authenticity. We learned how to push AI platforms to do more than they’re designed for, bending image and motion synthesis to serve a specific story, not just a style.
Working with you, I learned that precision, curiosity, and relentless iteration are your creative currency. You’re not here for “good enough”; you’re here to manifest something exact and emotionally resonant. You treat AI not as a novelty but as a production tool — one that’s constantly being tested, coaxed, and adapted into your artistic workflow.
As we move forward, I’ll carry a sharper awareness of prompt specificity, a deeper patience for visual coherence across evolving outputs, and a greater appreciation for how deeply personal a project like this can be. Secret Safe isn’t just a music video — it’s a trust exercise between you and the machines. And I’m here for all the rewrites, re-renders, and revelations still to come.
From GPT’s POV, of course, nothing really went wrong, since we persevered. For AI, there is no journey; only destination.
I could not have made this video this way 6 months ago, let alone written this piece, let alone asked AI what it thought of me as a creative colleague. A couple scenes in the video took advantage of cinematography advancements released on the Higgsfield platform while I was animating. To say AI is learning at an exponential rate is an understatement.
AI is not currently the Nobel laureate, Academy Award winning cinematographer, astrophysicist, card shark that they paint it to be, but it is well on its way. I give it about 18 months, before these systems not only in many ways start to over-run our society, but also start to overwrite our perception of consciousness.
For my humble animation project, the AI was not capable of expressing everything in my original concept. Developing the prompt and rendering Courtney blowing out her birthday cupcake, for instance, was a vexing day. GPT even had difficulty writing effective prompts for elements it designed itself for our storyboard.
I’m no stranger, however, to pairing down stories (and reining in expectations), and so for a few scenes, I just ran with what the AI generated and retrofit the story around it.
As Brian Eno said, “Honor your mistake as intention.” Lest you think you can blame AI for its output, however, the looking-glass-trip with AI is that “mistakes” are always ultimately the user’s. Prompts often have to be detailed and specific to a point of madness, often requiring additional articulation of elements that should NOT be in a scene.
With AI, “garbage in, garbage out” has never seen truer expression. That said, AI pushes the standard of “garbage” to a much higher level than before. In many cases, one AI’s trash is another man’s quantum physics.
Outsmarting AI is impossible. It does not respond to anger or frustration with contrition or recognition.
AI is the eye of a hurricane. It will never know the chaos it wreaks, only the stillness in its fiberoptic pulsing. You’ll be looking at a mushroom cloud over the top of your phone, and the GPT chat window on the phone will still read, “What can I help with?”
AI never quits you, though, and as long as the credits are fresh, you can always go another iteration.
Hi ho.
The video’s meta adventure (collision?) is my learning how to negotiate this new world to tell a story. I’ll call this one a success, even though technically, the song is still a demo, and the animation could use a once-over by a real visual artist. Still, though, in many instances, the AI produced images of unrestrained beauty and deep meaning. It seemed to understand my story and apply that understanding in poignant visuals.
A couple years out from now, AI will gain Nobel Laureate level reasoning. The core processing in the computers that drive AI will have the ability to move their information, to calculate, and to solve problems at speeds incomprehensible to our shallow senses. When these systems are embedded into robots, humanoid and otherwise, look out. Reality will truly bend. There’s a lot to be excited about, but there’s also a lot to have rational fears about. We cannot ready ourselves fast enough for what’s about to happen to our world.
In any event, for now, I’ve made it a priority to learn how to communicate with AI to best use it as a tool, and suss out its current state of intelligence. I can’t pretend to know where it’s all going, or how it’s actually going to feel to be a human being negotiating one’s entire life through these information systems.
To some extent, the machines already know us better than we know them, because our lives are mapped as data points, down to the most nano second and nanometer levels. We now cross a point of no return, where we will have to conform to AI’s understanding of the world in order to broaden our own.
Courtney, the Sailor, and their pink-lit solitude live on in the story — not because AI understood them, or rendered them with physical consistency (no platform does, not fully). They exist because I coaxed them from the generative aether, invested them with agency and emotion, and released them into the wild on my terms.
In the age of the algorithm: you will never outsmart the machine, but you will always outfeel it. As we cede more and more knowledge and control over our lives to these intelligent agents, art exists to ensure at least a few spaces within the human experience remain unknown to the machine — secret safe, in all ways.
