PHILLIP MCCLARY

Creator / Writer / Narrator
/ Audio Producer

Phillip McClary is an Illinois-based writer, songwriter, storyteller, performer, and independent creator whose work has always lived where music, memory, and hard truth meet.

​

For years, Phillip wrote and performed songs, played in bands, created visual and promotional work, and built stories around the people and places that shaped him. After surviving stage 4 throat cancer and losing much of the singing voice that had defined a major part of his life, Phillip found himself facing a question that became the heart of When We Played: What do you do when the voice you knew is gone, but the need to create is still alive?

​

The answer became this project.

​

Phillip brings more than writing to When We Played. He brings lived experience as a musician, performer, actor, producer, and sound-minded storyteller. His background in music and recording gives the project its emotional ear—an understanding that a creaking garage door, rain on a roof, an old cassette click, or the distant hum of an amp can tell as much of a story as dialogue.

​

As the narrator and voice of Older Phil, Phillip brings an honesty to the role that cannot be manufactured. His voice carries the damage, memory, humor, fear, and survival at the center of the story.

​

With When We Played, Phillip is not trying to recreate the life he had before cancer.

​

He is building something new from what remains.

BRANNAN MCCLARY

Writer / Sound Editor
/ Production Collaborator

Brannan McClary is a writer, creative collaborator, and sound-focused storyteller helping shape the world of When We Played from the page to the final mix.

​

Working closely with Phillip, Brannan brings a strong sense of story structure, emotional pacing, technical detail, and sound design to the production. His work helps turn a deeply personal story into an experience that can reach beyond one family, one town, or one generation.

​

As sound editor and production collaborator, Brannan helps guide the dialogue, music, ambience, Foley, and immersive audio elements that make When We Played more than a traditional spoken story. From the sound of rain against the garage roof to the placement of a voice just beyond the listener’s shoulder, every detail is being shaped to pull the audience deeper into the world.

Together, Phillip and Brannan are building When We Played as a full-cast immersive audio motion picture—one rooted in memory, music, loss, and the belief that some stories are not finished just because the people in them have grown older.

​

This is not simply a project about the past.

​

It is a project about hearing what the past still has to say.