The Hum

This award-winning mockumentary portrays “The Hum”, a cult festival on a remote Scottish isle where locals operate colossal modular synthesizers deep within limestone caves. Originally founded by an obsessed priest, the event is hailed for its transcendent acoustics – until a fatal accident shatters the idyll. Now, police investigations, generational shifts, and encroaching commercialization threaten to destroy the community’s fragile equilibrium.

This AI-generated short film was born from a vivid, slightly chaotic dream I had that was so striking I had to write it down the second I woke up. In this dream, I found myself on a remote Scottish island at an obscure music festival where dwarf-like musicians were performing deep inside limestone caves, huddled around a massive modular synthesizer. As a film composer with a lifelong obsession with synths, the music I heard in that dream stayed with me for months. I spent the following year building out this world in my notebooks, slowly spinning a narrative around this strange festival. I always had the inkling that AI tools might one day allow me to bring this vision to life as a mockumentary, but the tech hadn’t quite caught up yet.

That changed in late 2025 with the release of Google's Nano Banana Pro and Veo 3.1. After experimenting with these models, I realized the time was finally right to bring the dream to the screen. While the visuals were AI-assisted, the whole process was still deeply human. I spent roughly 80 to 100 hours writing the script, refining prompts, “casting” virtual characters, and handling the entire edit in Premiere Pro. The voices were generated and synced using ElevenLabs, and of course, being a film composer, I composed the entire score myself using my analog synthesizers to match the otherworldly vibe of The Hum.

Awards:

AUDIENCE AWARD (1st PRIZE, 211 ENTRIES) AT MIXED* HYBRID SHOWCASE, FEB 4, 2026, PORTLAND, OREGON, USA

ÉCU – The Independent Film Festival Paris, France - Award for “Best AI Film 2026”

Short Ways Festival São Paulo, Brazil, Award for “Best Audio Design In An AI Short Film”

Red Rocks AI Festival, USA “Best AI Comedy”

Festivals (2026): Sarasota Film Festival (USA) Vienna Shorts (Austria) Tilburg Music Film Festival (Netherlands) Soundtrack Cologne - See The Sound (Germany) Imagination Films International Festival, Bhilai (India) AI FilmFest Belgrade (Serbia) AFRICA AI CREATIVITY WEEK & AWARDS, Marrakech, (Morocco) SEOUL INTERNATIONAL AI Film Festival, (Korea) OMNI 1.5 HYPERPHANTASIA (Australia)