On December 24, 2020, the musician Sia publicly offered to fund CommunicationFIRST to make an introductory short to her new movie MUSIC. The short was intended to help humanize and spread awareness about real nonspeaking autistic people, who were left out of MUSIC, despite being the subject of the movie. After a team of nonspeaking and autistic people brought together by CommunicationFIRST in January 2021 previewed MUSIC and provided feedback and recommendations to Sia on how to improve it, they received no response from her team. In early February 2021, CommunicationFIRST decided to move forward to produce a self-funded short by and with real nonspeaking autistic people, and to launch it on February 12, 2021, the MUSIC US release date. The film LISTEN is the result.