There is a moment near the end of Castle Lager’s latest campaign where everything stops. The music pulls back and a beat of silence holds. And then it drops, and when it does, you really feel it!
That silence wasn’t in the original arrangement. It was a creative collaborative decision that only came to life during the Final Mix.
We were brought in by director WARD (Paul Ward) and Giant Films, alongside agencies Bananas South Africa and Retroviral, to deliver the full Music and Audio for Castle Lager’s tribute to Bafana Bafana fans. The brief was all about emotion: recreate defining moments from decades of South African football history, and make audiences really feel those moments, and what they meant.
Starting With the Right Foundation
The project started with the perfect song choice. Music Supervisor Marc Algranti and the agency landed on Camille Yarbrough’s 1975 classic “Take Yo Praise,” (the track later sampled by Fatboy Slim in “Praise You.”) That decision handed us the ideal foundation: a hook the world already knew that we could make feel like it was born in a South African stadium.
With the rights secured to fully re-record the track, we had complete creative control. We rebuilt it from the ground up.
Mbali Makhoba’s, singer of iconic South African band Freshlyground, lead vocal carries the devotional weight of the original while grounding it in something unmistakably local. Set against a local choir, the result is a haunting, cinematic anthem, one that doesn’t just accompany the film, but becomes its emotional backbone. The arrangement moves with the film’s arc, beginning with restraint, a single voice carrying the memory of those defining moments, before expanding into something collective. As if the stadium itself begins to sing.
Building the Crowd That Wasn’t There
We had to use Sound Design to make the stadiums feel real.
We pulled in a bunch of our team and gathered them around a couple of microphones, along with members of the agency (yes, Sean and Justin from Bananas were in the room too) and recorded the chorus, take after take, until the energy in the room matched what the film demanded. Around 15 to 20 takes. Our goal was to build scale.
The technique that unlocked it was a vocoder: a process that takes recorded voice and blends it with another sound source. In this case, instead of a synthesiser, we used the voices of the group combined with white noise to capture the tone and texture of a large crowd. We then shaped it further with reverb and delay, letting it expand and resonate the way sound does inside a stadium.
That same attention to detail ran through every era of football history the film touches. The different moments needed authentic crowd and commentator audio true to each period’s broadcast quality, so we processed each separately by treating the microphone characteristics and speaker quality the way they would have existed at the time. Heartbreak moments were given bass drops, with crowd sounds pitched and warped to give the feeling of your heart falling out of your chest. Joyous moments got preemptive silence: a held breath before the ecstatic roar breaks.
What the Final Mix Made Possible
Having original composition, sound design and final mix all living under one roof within one creative process meant that nothing was siloed. When the music shifted, the rest of the audio world could respond in real time. That fluidity changed what was possible, and it changed how the work was made.
The pause before the final drop is the clearest example. This powerful moment was discovered through the kind of exploratory collaboration that only works when there is genuine trust between everyone in the room.
Director WARD spoke to that dynamic directly:
“We came in with a strong direction, but we also knew we wanted to push the sonic landscape, explore it, not just execute it. Having PCS on board gave us real confidence that we could go after both the big ideas and the finer craft details together. Whether that was introducing a choir or making more subtle instrumental shifts, that collaborative trust meant we never had to hold back. What also made a huge difference was having all the audio elements (music, sound design, mix) living within one creative process. It meant everything was fluid. That seamlessness allowed us to keep pushing the craft right up until the very end, which on a project like this, where emotion is everything, matters enormously.”
Justin Gomes, Bananas Co-Founder and CCO, felt the same creative charge:
“We set out to make an ad that could stand the test of time, and knew we needed a soundtrack epic enough to capture not just the highs, but also the lows of what it’s meant to be a Bafana supporter over the last thirty years. Pressure Cooker’s re-interpretation of Praise You and its integration into their meticulously crafted sonic landscape has helped create a deep emotional connection with viewers beyond our expectations.”
Restraint as a Creative Choice
Across every layer of this project, the discipline was restraint. The film lives inside the emotional arc of Bafana Bafana fans, and music is emotion. Which means the risk of tipping into something over-the-top, something expected, was always there. As WARD put it: “the moment music becomes emotionally telegraphed, it paradoxically loses its power.”
The mandate was simple: “make people feel something”. But feeling something real is harder than feeling something obvious. It requires knowing when to hold back, when to let a single voice carry the weight instead of a full choir, when to stop the music entirely and let silence speak.
The closing transition, from Mbali Makhoba’s solo voice to a full stadium of voices carrying the same melody, mirrors the film’s emotional journey from individual memory to collective experience.
Composition, re-arrangement, recordings, sound design and final mix: all crafted collaboratively, under one roof. That is how we work. And on this project, it is what allowed us to keep going, keep refining, keep finding the moments that make the difference between a great commercial and something people genuinely feel.
Vaughan Croeser, Vice President Marketing at South African Breweries, summed up the impact:
“Of the multiple elements that make a strong piece of communication resonate with an audience, few things come close to the power of music. The sound design on Castle Lager’s latest advert is testament to this. Beautifully crafted, it takes you on an auditory journey of symphonic proportions. Pressure Cooker has created something truly emotive and cinematic, capturing the sound of South African football history.”
Here’s to the fans that stood the test of time. And to the team that made it all possible.
Want to go even deeper behind the sound and music? Watch this:
Read more on ididthat about why everyone thinks this Castle Lager ad is archive footage here.