Every Thursday we're opening the studio doors and answering all of your questions. Technical, industry, fandom or otherwise - drop your question in the comments below - and we'll hop to it. (We're fielding Q's on Facebook, Twitter and G+ too, if that's easier!)

Fire away!

First up from Twitter:

Hi Lolene, yes we do run workshops and Q&A's with our creatives throughout the year at various events. In fact, Anya director Damien O'Connor will be at the ShortSpace July shorts screening tonight fielding a Q&A section at the end. We also have a workshop for kids with two of our creatives coming up as part of the Galway Film Fleadh this year.

We post tutorials from our staff on our Tutorials page and are happy to give any advice or critique that we can!

We love to hear what people want to see more of so do let us know!

Next up:

Thanks for the question Dani, we had our Bing director Nicky Phelan field this question:

It depends on the project and their cast of characters; most of our current shows’ characters are voiced by either American or British actors. Charlie, Bing’s baby cousin, is voiced by a very talented mini-Irish actress, Poppy, and we’ll be able to announce a new character joining the cast in Bing soon, voiced by a very talented Irish actress. 

Next up we have:

Bing director Nicky Phelan shared his description:

Collaborative, thorough, demanding, rewarding, all in pursuit of the best we can do with the time we’ve got.

Next we have Seán O'Beirn who asked:

Hey guys/gals,

My name is Sean! I follow your blog regularly and love the cool things you post, specifically the digital paintings that you take inspiration from. I've recently delved into this area myself and am currently building a portfolio.

Apologies if this is a little longwinded! My question is, while I know how to use photoshop, illustrator, flash and many of the other adobe suite programs, what jobs are obtainable as a digital artist, specifically a digital painter? I lack the hardware to run and learn about 3-D modelling software so I wonder what job categories I can apply to within a production company such as yourselves and others, that I can use a title such as Digital Artist/Painter?

Thanks! #AMA

Our Peter Rabbit Art Director Stephen Robinson fielded this one:

Hi Sean!

There are several jobs that come to mind: It very much depends on your own personal interests as a painter. If you are interested in design, have colour skills and a good eye for materials there is colour key work for character, sets and prop assets. You would work from existing 2D drawings, or greyscale model renders, and come up with design suggestions for these assets in the form of digital paintings. In Brown Bag Films this job is often done by a texture artist or an art director.

If you are into scenic painting, Matte Painting is often required in CG shows, both for use as backdrops in the sets for areas that are too far away to need to be modelled, and also sometimes standing in as the entire set for certain shots, matching exactly the style of the CG sets of the show.

Lighting keys are also required in production, where an artist envisions how the atmosphere of a set will look when finally lit as a guide to the lighters. You would need a good feeling for mood, be able to imagine sets at any time of day.

All of these jobs are usually combined with others in the CG pipeline, and a good working knowledge of this is very important in terms of knowing what would be possible to achieve, or what would be most economical. All this knowledge is easy to pick up, harder is a sharp aesthetic sensibility, so if you have that, it’s a huge advantage!

Next question is from Lynn O'Reilly:

We had Doc McStuffins Episodic and Art Director Bronagh O'Hanlon answer this one:

My favourite cartoons growing up where Dungeons and Dragons and Ulysses 31. I really liked these because they had a more epic feel and an overarching storyline than other shows at the time. In both shows the storyline that ran through the episodes was the goal of getting home. Because of shows like this any development work I do on shows tends to consider the entire longterm goals of the characters in the show. It is not just about 52 episodes of single stories thrown together, but how they all tie in, to slowly create a bigger more developed end goal and story. That makes the characters and their worlds more saturated.

That's a wrap on this weeks AMA session, thanks for all your questions and see you again next week!