Hefty Cat Studios

We are a husband-and-wife team based out of the state of Utah where we live with our little family. We got interested in doing audio work when we heard about the first Audio Maker competition that Yoto held.

Lisa has always been a fan of books, and we read one together as a family almost every night.

She has written stories for a murder mystery company in the past and loved the idea of writing a children's story. Jorel has done voice work for language learning programs and has performed on stage in the past, but always loved doing the funny voices for our children's story time. We decided to put our creative powers together for the contest and thought that would be it.

However, when we saw the huge fan reception for our story and the videos of kids laughing at the different voices, we got hooked on making more.

This story is very inspired by our kids. They all LOVE cats. Unfortunately, most of our kids are allergic to them. We have stuffed cats, stories of cats, movies about cats, etc. throughout our house because of them.

When we were deciding on what story to write of course they begged us to write one about a cat adventure. Lisa realized that the adventure could be interactive, and listeners could enjoy not just listening, but exploring the many choices and results a silly adventure could bring.

We started small with the first version of this story during the competition, mostly because of the deadline. We had a lot of young listeners try it out over and over again, and their parents would share their experiences. We realized then that there was more this adventure could hold and kids were eager to explore more.

We think this is fun for the whole family! We've seen siblings working together as they listen, parents and kids taking notes on where they are, and even kids by themselves laughing at what happens next. We think we've made the stakes interesting for the kids so they feel like their choices matter and laugh because it is the right amount of silly.

We think making audio for Yoto has been a good experience for us. It has pushed us to learn more and really create something that is a step up from what is normally offered.

Yoto really is the only place where our interactive audio adventure shines with the different pictures and the ability to skip exactly to where you want.

Yoto for our family has been a great way for our youngest kid to try new stories and have a more relaxing time winding down at night.

We have a couple of different story ideas, but we haven't officially started working on a new story yet. We would like to wait and see what people like about the latest story.