THE HUM
Not all heroes hear hums.
A Short Film
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Not all heroes hear hums.
When a team of professional thieves unknowingly disrupts the frequency a ten-year-old autistic boy depends on to sleep, he slips into the night to fix it, with no idea armed criminals are surrounding him.
"The greatest threat to their operation
is not the police.
It is a ten-year-old boy who has no idea they exist."
Ten-year-old Femi is an autistic boy who hears the world differently. A brilliant young builder with an extraordinary sensitivity to patterns and frequencies, he spends his nights surrounded by half-finished inventions, dismantled electronics, and the comforting hum of a device he built himself, a sound that helps quiet the noise of the world.
On the same night his uncle Yomi arrives from Nigeria for his first visit to America, Femi's mother is called away by an unexpected work emergency, leaving two near-strangers under the same roof.
Across the street, a team of professional thieves begins executing a meticulously planned burglary. Using sophisticated jamming technology, they disable cameras and alarm systems, creating an invisible window to crack a safe worth millions.
"Everything goes according to plan. Until Femi hears them. Not the thieves themselves. The signal."
The low-frequency interference generated by their jamming equipment pierces the hum Femi depends on every night. To everyone else, it is nonexistent. To Femi, it is wrong. And wrong demands a solution.
Without waking Yomi, Femi slips out of the house and follows the interference into the dark, entirely unaware that armed criminals surround him.
Moving with singular focus, Femi dismantles equipment, triggers dormant systems, and unknowingly turns a precision operation into a cascading disaster. Security cameras reactivate. Lights begin flashing. The thieves, convinced someone is hunting them, scramble to regain control, and only dig deeper into chaos.
"Part suspense thriller. Part family drama. All told through the eyes of a boy the world underestimates."
Yomi discovers Femi is missing. On his first night in America, responsible for a child he barely understands, he launches a desperate search that draws police attention to the neighborhood, and unknowingly tightens the noose around the thieves.
By dawn, the heist has collapsed. The thieves are in custody. And Femi, back in his bedroom, dismantles the source of the interference, restores the familiar hum, and falls asleep.
Standing in the living room, shaken, Yomi hears a small cough from Femi's room. Relief. Outside, the thieves are led away in handcuffs. Only the audience understands what really happened.
THE HUM places an autistic protagonist at the center of a high-concept genre story, inviting audiences to experience suspense, wit, and wonder through a neurodivergent perspective rarely seen in mainstream cinema.
It is a story about perception, misunderstanding, and the extraordinary impact that comes from seeing, and hearing, the world differently.
I didn't write Femi. I recognized him.
Growing up in a Nigerian household, silence was its own language. There were things you couldn't explain, things adults dismissed as strangeness or stubbornness. I watched people I loved get misread their entire lives, not because they had nothing to offer, but because the world only received one kind of transmission. I made this film because I believe the frequency some people broadcast on isn't broken. It's just rare.
The Hum is a suspense thriller. But at its core, it's about what happens when a boy the world has already written off becomes the most important person in a room, and never knows it. Femi doesn't save anyone through courage the world can name. He saves them by being exactly, completely himself. Genre was my delivery system.
Authentic Representation
The first creative decision I made, before location, before casting, was that I would not represent autism from the outside looking in.
That meant bringing Dr. Kerry Magro in not as a sign-off consultant, but as a collaborator who shaped Femi's interiority from the ground up. Dr. Magro is autistic. He's lived the gap between what a person experiences and what the world projects onto them.
The sound design is the film's second screenplay. We built a sonic identity system that puts the audience inside Femi's hierarchy of perception: when the hum rises, the world drops away. When it goes silent, the audience is left in the same disoriented present Femi navigates every day. Visually, the camera earns his perspective rather than observing it, staying at his eye line, lingering where he lingers, refusing to cut away just because something doesn't advance the plot conventionally. His attention is the plot.
What This Film Can Do
Black autistic children are nearly invisible in genre cinema. When they appear, they're either the subject of someone else's emotional arc or proof that a neurotypical character has grown. Femi is neither. He's the protagonist of his own story, one he doesn't fully know he's in, and the genre structure makes that invisibility legible. The audience sees everything he cannot. That dramatic irony creates suspense. It also creates a reckoning: you've been underestimating this child the entire film, and he just won.
The Hum is not advocacy cinema. It doesn't ask you to pity Femi or celebrate him as inspirational. It asks you to keep up with him, and then reveals you almost couldn't. That's the shift I'm after. Not sympathy. Recalibration.
I chose this story because it demands the most of me, formally, morally, and culturally. The discomfort of that space isn't incidental. It's the whole point.
A Universe in the Making
The Hum is the pilot for something larger. I'm developing Femi's story as the foundation of an ongoing series, a universe in which his extraordinary sensitivity to frequency, pattern, and interference consistently positions him, without his knowledge, at the center of situations on the verge of crisis. He doesn't set out to be a hero. He doesn't even understand he's in danger. He's simply following the signal.
What changes in the series is Yomi. In the short, Femi's uncle is a man out of his depth, arriving in a country he doesn't know, responsible for a child he doesn't yet understand. By the time the credits roll, something has shifted in him. He has watched Femi move through chaos with a clarity that no one else in that street possessed. He has seen what Femi can do.
In the world beyond this film, Yomi becomes Femi's quiet guardian, the one adult who recognises that Femi's mind isn't something to be managed or accommodated. It's a gift with a radius. Yomi doesn't steer Femi toward danger. He positions himself between Femi and its consequences, letting the boy follow his instincts while ensuring those instincts don't get him killed. It's a partnership Femi will never fully understand and Yomi will never fully explain. That tension, between a child who sees everything except the threat, and a man who sees the threat in everything, is the engine of the series.
This short is the proof of concept. The world, the tone, the relationship, all of it begins here, on one night, on one street, with one boy who just wanted to fix a sound.
Writer & Director
Ayoola Ayolola is a Nigerian-American writer and director whose work sits at the intersection of genre filmmaking and cultural specificity. Raised in a Nigerian household, he grew up navigating the space between two worlds, a tension that has become the defining preoccupation of his storytelling. He is the founder of One87 Company, an independent production company committed to amplifying underrepresented voices through commercial genre work. The Hum is his most personal project to date, a suspense thriller built around a Black autistic boy whose way of perceiving the world saves lives no one else could. Ayoola wrote the film not as an outside observer but as someone who has watched people he loves get misread their entire lives, not because they had nothing to offer, but because the world only received one kind of transmission. The Hum is his answer to that silence.
Producer
Abbesi Akhamie is a writer, director, and producer based in New York City. Born in Heidelberg, Germany, of Nigerian descent, she holds a BA in Communications from George Mason University and is currently an MFA candidate at NYU's graduate film program. Over the past five years she has produced and directed several acclaimed shorts, including The Couple Next Door, Still Waters Run Deep, and The Incredible Sensational Fiancée of Dr Seyi Ajayi, screened at festivals across the country. Abbesi brings to The Hum a lived understanding of what it means to exist between cultures, to be seen partially and understood incompletely. That intimacy with the film's emotional terrain, a Nigerian-American boy whose way of perceiving the world is his greatest power, is precisely what makes her investment in this project more than professional. It is personal.
Autism Consultant
Dr. Kerry Magro is an award-winning autism speaker, best-selling author, and autism advocate who was diagnosed with autism at the age of four. He is the founder of KFM Making a Difference, a non-profit that has provided over $100,000 in scholarships to individuals with autism. A prolific speaker who has presented at hundreds of events across the country, Kerry has been featured by CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC. He is the author of Defining Autism From The Heart and Autism and Falling in Love, among others. Kerry brings to The Hum not only professional expertise but lived experience, shaping Femi's inner world from the inside out, ensuring the film honours the full complexity of what it means to be autistic in a world built for different minds.
THE HUM is actively seeking funding and grant support. If you are a funder, grant committee, or collaborator interested in bringing this story to screen, we'd love to connect.
Get in Touch
To: one87company@gmail.com