"Style is not decoration;
it is the atmosphere
through which a story
breathes."
There is something quietly incendiary about Lisa Brunner’s work.
Not loud. Not declarative. Not engineered for spectacle.
Instead, it smolders — somewhere between memory and machine, between control and surrender. Her journey into AI filmmaking does not read like a pivot. It feels more like a return: to instinct, to play, to a kind of creative sovereignty that predates permission.
Raised in an environment where imagination was not only allowed but embodied, Lisa’s earliest experiences with storytelling were tactile, mischievous, and alive. Fire in garden canisters. Dolls in disaster films. Improvised worlds stitched together with curiosity rather than rules.
What emerges now, decades later, through generative AI, is not a break from that origin — but its evolution.
Q: You began creating films as a child using Super 8 and later pursued figurative expressionism when it was considered out of step with the times. How did these early creative choices shape your willingness to explore emerging technologies like AI today?
A: My parents were extraordinarily generous in the freedoms they extended to our childhood imagination. Both held demanding, rather unglamorous full-time jobs, yet whenever they had a moment, my mother would draw and my father would sculpt—sometimes even engineering elaborate contraptions, like a giant coffee machine with a doll’s leg that kicked a sugar cube into a cup of coffee. That appetite for making things, for inventing small worlds, was simply the water I swam in.
So when my sister and I decided to set dried grass alight in metal canisters in the garden—purely to generate a swirling mist for our Super 8 vampire films—no one came running to stop us. When we drained the inflatable pool to stage a Barbie disaster movie, that was entirely acceptable too. We were trusted to experiment, to fail noisily, and to keep going.
Later, at art school in Geneva, I arrived with a firm commitment to figurative expressionism—which, at the time, was considered thoroughly passé. The institution was largely producing artists trained to develop a discourse inversely proportional to the actual content of their work: the less there was to see, the more there was to say. I found that deeply alienating.
I left frustrated, and for a long stretch of years I felt genuinely repelled by the act of creation—until a small camera found its way into my hands and I rediscovered, through framing and composition, something that felt instinctive rather than performed.
This profound frustration eventually made the arrival of AI a revelation. It represents a return to that childhood sovereignty: a space where one can create without seeking permission or making concessions, finally unburdened by the conventions of a gatekeeping art world.
Q. Your career spans copywriting, journalism, photography, art direction, and multimedia design. What were the key milestones that guided your transition from traditional creative disciplines into cutting-edge generative AI video work?
A. Transitioning from copywriting to visual disciplines was, in part, a necessity born of “blank-page anxiety.” Yet because I was working alongside designers—and because I had always painted and photographed since childhood—I became increasingly aware that visual expression was more immediate for me, more organic. I wanted, quite simply, to move to the other side of the barrier.
That shift happened through a mixture of continuing education and self-teaching. I have always had a strong autodidactic streak, and an equally strong curiosity about technology. So when the first publicly accessible creative AI tools appeared, I moved toward them very naturally.
The real turning point, however, was not merely technical excitement. It was an image: I had prompted something as simple as an albatross, and the system returned it in a bleak, lonely urban landscape. What struck me was that this solitude had not been asked for, and yet it appeared—almost uncannily, like an echo of Baudelaire’s albatross: awkward, isolated.
That moment taught me something essential: AI does not merely execute instructions. It produces layers of accumulated meaning, resonances, and strange alchemies beyond conscious intention. The richness lies precisely in what one does not control.
I came to understand that approaching AI with humility—with an openness to receive what it offers rather than merely extracting what one has already decided to want—unlocks something qualitatively different. It is, in the truest sense, a creative ping-pong.
The transition to video followed naturally. When I began experimenting with early generative tools—imperfections and all—I immediately felt that something extraordinary was taking shape. There is still a nostalgic affection among certain practitioners for those early, flawed renders; something in their rawness felt alive.
My instinct then, as now, was simple: we are holding something that is about to explode.
Q. During your time working on advertising concept development at Swatch Group, you helped craft visual narratives for luxury brands. How did your experience working within luxury brands influence the way you approach storytelling and aesthetics in AI-generated film today?
A. I suspect I have always had a strong impostor syndrome, and perhaps because of that, my approach was not one of assumed authority but of immersion. Before I could contribute anything meaningful, I needed to steep myself thoroughly in the history of each brand I worked on. I needed a great deal of material—references, archives, tone, codes, contradictions—in order to extract what one might call the substantive marrow of a brand: its true DNA. I still work that way today. I need density before I can simplify.
Today, in AI work, I approach any project with a similar disposition: highly open at the start, deliberately non-directive, allowing the process to surface things I would never have conceived of in advance. Where I become more directive is in the definition of style.
Style is not decoration; it is the atmosphere through which a story breathes.
Each story deserves its own visual language, and one of the extraordinary things about AI is how far one can now push stylistic precision. To me, style is not a moodboard—it is one of the primary expressive vehicles of a work.
Q. You’ve described AI not as a shortcut, but as a form of creative freedom — sometimes unpredictable and even dissonant. How do you collaborate with that unpredictability while still maintaining a strong artistic voice?
A. I spend a lot of time refining stylistic systems, because style can already carry mood, ambiguity, unease, elegance, and obscurity—all sorts of psychological weather.
As for prompting itself, I tend to work with psychological states, emotional registers, and deliberately abstract notions rather than over-directing every literal detail. The less one strangles the process, the more unexpected doors open.
The real labour lies in discerning, harvesting, and shaping those accidents into something coherent and intentional.
Working with AI is not so different from working with a human creative. If one leaves a meaningful gap, something richer can come through. My approach lives in that tension: structure and surrender.
Q. You’ve explored sensitive themes such as domestic violence and confidence-building initiatives through AI video. How do you see generative tools empowering more women to tell personal or underrepresented stories in filmmaking?
A. AI emerges from a culture of openness—of sharing, accessibility, and inclusion. And there is a genuine desire within these communities to amplify voices that historically lacked access.
What is truly exceptional about this moment is the democratization at play. People who never had the infrastructure or resources to produce ambitious work can now do so.
So yes, these tools can empower women—especially when telling intimate, difficult, or poetic stories. But more broadly, they empower anyone whose voice has been constrained.
It doesn’t erase inequality overnight. But it opens the door.
Q. Many young women are just beginning to explore AI and creative technology. What advice or encouragement would you offer to help them grow with confidence and find their own voice in this rapidly evolving space?
A. The dominant aesthetic in AI still leans toward spectacle—toward scale, speed, and aggression. And from the outside, it can feel like the space belongs to someone else.
But there is immense room for other sensibilities: poetry, fragility, ambiguity, emotional subtlety.
My advice is simple:
Look past the technical façade. It only feels technical until you begin.
What matters is not mastery, but persistence. Curiosity. Refinement.
And most importantly: do not wait for permission.
The space is not full.
It is still being written.
Lisa Brunner does not treat AI as a tool. She treats it as weather.
Something that moves through the work. Something that resists containment. Something that, when approached with too much control, goes silent.
Her practice is not about mastering the machine. It is about listening to it.
In a field still dominated by spectacle and speed, her work exists in another register—slower, stranger, more intimate. A space where uncertainty is not a flaw, but a condition of meaning.
And perhaps that is where the future of AI storytelling will be shaped.
Not only in power.
But in perception.
A quieter revolution.
One that does not announce itself.
But changes everything nonetheless.
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