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From the Archives: the Making-Of the OLIVIA Opening Theme!





We've had a touch of nostalgia and decided to peak back into our archives where we came across this gem, the wonderful opening theme to OLIVIA!

As most of you know, the opening titles are one of the most important elements in any TV show. They should capture the essence of what it’s about, give a glimpse of character, and hopefully be entertaining with a nice little narrative.

If the opening title sequence works right it should have your audience hooked right from the start!

The first thing we needed to do for the process of coming up with the opening theme for Olivia was to come up with a concept.

We settled on the idea that somehow the opening would focus around the name ‘OLIVIA’. Usually on a show like this the name might be re-versioned for different countries (for example Noddy is “Oui-Oui” in France) but in this case it was decided that the show was not going to change its name from country to country and it would be Olivia everywhere!

The other aims we had were to show Olivia’s different costumes and fantasies and introduce the different characters from the show. Our animation director on Olivia, Matthew Darragh, took the lead on the opening titles and worked closely with our 2D artist Derek Horan to storyboard some different ideas.

Here are some of the early concept storyboards:

The music was directly inspired by Olivia creator Ian Falconer and his taste for jazz & ragtime music. This informed the choice of instruments for our brilliant musician on the show Darren Hendley.

Ian had made up a CD with some choices for music that he liked to inform the show and sent it to us and this was a great help!

Here’s a first pass of the music:

After playing around with different musical styles we decided that we would like to mention Olivia’s name in the opening song. We came up with the idea of Olivia’s name being shouted out.

Our musician, Darren brought in his niece Heidi (who had been one of our voice performers on Wobblyland) and she laid down a demo track to give us an idea of what we wanted. 

If you listen closely you’ll hear that she is having trouble pronouncing the ‘V’ in Olivia and actually singing ‘Olidia’!

We recorded lots of kids doing versions of the opening song. They were all great singers, very polished, excellent performers… and yet something was missing.

Finally it was Chorion‘s Waheed Ali himself who asked ‘Why are we trying to find trained singers to do this song when we have the perfect voice in front of us all the time?’

You can’t capture the kind of innocent exuberance that Heidi lashed out on take one for Darren. The perfect singer had been staring us in the face all along, now all we had to do was pick up those ‘V’s’ that Heidi had missed the first time around!

We got in a bunch of kids from the Dublin Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rathmines and they did a great job on the backing vocals.

Here is a video of a bunch of the kids from the school having fun at the audition:

There you have it, the process of putting together all the wonderful elements that left us with the final opening theme for OLIVIA!

And the BEST part?

Seeing kids’ reactions!

Hope you enjoyed diving back in time with us as much as we did!


Anahita Tabarsi

Anahita is Brown Bag Films' Marketing Director, Digital & Social and drinks more than five coffees a day...

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Brown Bag Labs is an exciting online space, brought to you by Brown Bag Films. We share great content for families as well as behind the scenes fun and tutorials from the Brown Bag Films team.