Friend In Need

This brutally honest, award-winning campaign written by Western Australian agency Wildlings, and produced at Soundbyte, was hugely rewarding to be a part of. When Creative Directors Matt Wilson & Pat Lennox approached Soundbyte to be a part of this campaign, they all knew that honesty would have to be at its core.

The voice grabs heard in the spots are based off of real life online posts. This inspired Soundbyte’s senior sound engineer, Brad Habib, to really consider how to best represent the people that would have made these posts.  Casting would be integral, the voices had to do a lot of the heavy lifting to convey the complete disregard the posts had for the issue on hand.

Rather than look to the traditional, Brad and the team at Soundbyte went about street casting the roles. Pulling in various young voices, many whom had never done a voiceover before, to help bring the stories to life.  Traditionally, to save time, each role would have been allocated to one person, however to ensure we made the best connection possible to each post, we had every actor voice every line. This gave Brad the ultimate flexibility when it came to mixing the spots.

The sound design for these spots was really kept to a minimal. The temptation to compose a really emotive track, or add lots of detailed sound design was lurking just around the corner, but it would be a cheap trick. Brad was convinced the raw emotion had to come from the copy and the performance. The key to these radio ads was honesty, and the sound design had to reflect that.