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!)

Does Brown Bag use any sort of facial tracking software to animate faces?@BrownBagFilms #AMA

— Donal Sean O'Donohoe (@DonalODonohoe) March 13, 2014

Our Technical Director Eoin Kavanagh is tackling the first two questions of the day: for facial animation we hook character blend shapes of phonemes up to a facial rig. No tracking, just models built up in Maya.

@Octonauts @BrownBagFilms is that a new surface water rendering technique on the Barracudas episode? Very cool. Son is dying to see Gup-R!

— Andy Thomas (@AThomas75) March 10, 2014

Afraid not Andy, the water surface for the barracudas was just an arch and design water shader. Not much goin on there!

@BrownBagFilms When recruiting Story Artists, would you prefer to see animatics, board sheets or both? :D

— Adam Barker (@_AdamBarker_) March 6, 2014

Doc McStuffins Episodic Director Dan Nosella writes:

Preferably we would not get animatics – we want to see the images work and flow well on the page. Ideally we want to see clear, coherent compositions and staging that tell the story well. Nice posing, good acting, dynamic storytelling are what we look for first, it is up to us to make it all work well in animatic form.

What would you like to see in a reel of a graduate animator who would love to work @BrownBagFilms ? :) Thanks! #AMA

— Emanuela Gatto (@emanuelagatto) March 20, 2014

Our Episodic Director, Shane Collins, wrote this last week:

I would look for a mixture of acting and action scenes. Mainly it comes down to the 12 principles of animation, focussing on acting and timing, facial expressions, lipsync and body mechanics.

I'm not a big fan of showreels with just realistic dinosaurs walking around and screaming, it doesn't give much information on acting etc. Fair enough the dinosaur walks nicely, but if you can make a human walk nicely the fundamentals are similar for a dinosaur, just make the weight heavier etc. To me the snappy pose to pose animation of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is animation at its best!

@BrownBagFilms How much does it cost to animate 5 - 10 mins of Octonauts or Doc McStuffins & how much time does it take? #AMA

— Ahrani Logan (@AhraniLogan) March 20, 2014#

Ahrani - if we were working on one episode of The Octonauts in isolation it would take 65 weeks to complete from script concept through to final cut. As for how much it costs to make, it varies show-to-show, season-to-season, but it's more biscuits than I can count!

@BrownBagFilms What's the audio set-up like at Brown Bag HQ? How many studios? Do you guys record Foley, ADR etc in house? many thanks!

— Eoin Ryan (@eoin_ryan84) March 20, 2014

Our Sound engineer, Chris Carroll writes: We have one studio where we can record ADR. There's no foley sound stage but we can record some foley effects in the ADR booth. We record all this on a Mac with Protools HD10. Hope that answers your question!

@BrownBagFilms #AMA Apart from Maya what software dose the studio use? UV Layout? BodyPaint? Mari? Nuke?

— The Rusted Pixel (@therustedpixel) March 20, 2014

Thanks for asking Paul - we use MAYA for modelling, rigging and animation. Other than that we use Nuke for compositing, Photoshot for textures and SVN/Shotgun for assets/production.