Ever found yourself wondering what an Audio Engineer gets up to on a typical day? We asked Brown Bagger Tim O'Donovan to break down his day:

Audio Delivering

Downloading, checking and filing whatever audio deliveries come in overnight from studios in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville or London, depending on the show. A lot of the shows we make are collaborations with other studios, the location of the voice actors usually determines where recordings take place.

Dialogue Recording

I'll check the script, highlight who says what, and in collaboration with the episodic director, record numerous takes of character lines until we're happy we've got the best take. We use Pro Tools for this - and for most of everything I do. I love the interaction with the voice actors - during voice records, everyone gets to be creative and it's great to hear a sentence take on a whole new life when it's read by a talented actor.

Dialogue Editing

Editing the voice recordings for the 2 shows I'm currently working on - Doc McStuffins or Henry Hugglemonster - as per the director's notes. We get the raw audio in from the studios and I edit the audio, and that becomes the template for the whole episode. (This is known as a radioplay.)

This is where the timing of the episode gets tweaked, with lines being added or removed as required. I try to make the story flow as much as possible, overlapping some lines and tightening up pauses to make the interactions between characters more believable and not just actors saying their lines in isolation. Legibility and finding a good rhythm are massively important.

Most productions record each actor separately for practical reasons. (Though the interactions and ad libbing that happens when actors get the chance to record together are often hilarious and can lead to great unexpected improvised lines.) Having sat in on various recording sessions it's great to observe how the voice director, engineer, series director and actors all work together to bring the words on the page to life.

The final edited radioplay gets passed onto the storyboard artists who go on to draw panels according to what they hear.

Scratch Dialogue Recording

Sometimes actors can't make it to a recording session and need to be recorded at a later date. In order to get the radioplay out for the storyboard artists to get working on, scratch or temporary recordings must be inserted in - this often results in me recording my best Henry Hugglemonster/Doc McStuffins/Hallie Hippo/Random Episodic Character impersonation, and dropping it into the episode.

I've learned to channel my inner purple hippo.

Creating Sound Effects

The offline video editors often come to me looking for sound effects to bring certain scenes in the animatic to life, or to accentuate certain movements or emotions. Sometimes I'll use library fx, other times a particular effect is arrived at by tweaking, pitch shifting, stretching and/or layering various sounds in order to achieve what the episodic director is looking for.

Dialogue Mixing

Season 1 of Henry Hugglemonster was mixed in-house by Dominic Lawrence (sitting in the sound studio next to me). All the sounds, effects, voices, songs and music were brought together, over countless Pro Tools tracks, to create 52 episodes. When it comes time to show a series in a different territory, decisions are made on who to replace with local voices, in order to appeal more to the local market. When it came time to show Henry Hugglemonster on Disney UK nearly all the main character voices were replaced.

All the new voices were recorded in London, then sent over to me to mix into the existing Pro Tools sessions. It takes a while to get used to the new Henry, or the new Daddo, but after working on 52 episodes, you feel they always sounded like that. It's very important to have every word a character utters clear and legible above all the other sounds. (As Dominic always says: dialogue is king).

Music

I'm occasionally asked to compose music for animations, like the short film we produced with Fighting Words. I'll be told the kind of mood or what instrumentation is needed sometimes, other times I just make stuff up that I think suits the feel of the pictures. The director will then send notes on any changes they require.

And that's a very brief idea of what I do! I record voiceovers and I also make and perform music outside of BBF. The urge to make and play music and make and mess with sounds of any description grabbed a serious hold of me at an early age and hasn't let go. That's why I love working in this area.