TEXAS – The pandemic took Hollywood production calendars and threw them in the trash. Funimation, an online platform where fans can watch anime based out of Texas, wasn't exempt from that effect.

The company is also known for dubbing Japanese anime, and when lockdowns started across the country, studio recording sessions had to be postponed.

That meant dubbed versions of fan favorites like My Hero Academia had to be put on hold right in the middle of the season.

Vice President of Operations and Production Karen Mika knew something had to be done.

"(We) started to discuss how we could do this from home after the first week of our Dallas production studios being shut down," she said. "We realized this would be longer than just a month or a few weeks."

She enlisted the help of Justin Cook, a senior producer, engineer, and anime legend who voiced Yusuke Urameshi in Yu Yu Hakusho.

He's made a career out of bringing together a worldwide audience with anime and was determined to keep the pandemic from slowing that down.

"Whatever happens in the world I don't think they can take that away from us, and we're not gonna let them," Cook said. "So the idea immediately started to occur - 'How do we keep doing this?'"

The team came up with a way to turn their studios in Dallas into an all-in-one kit that voice actors could put together at home. The kits included mic stands, ipads, studio quality microphones with all the connections and a manual with step-by-step instructions for install.

Voice actors David Matranga and Emily Neves took the home studio concept and ran with it. The couple turned their walk-in closet into a home studio, complete with carpet, insulation and foam lining the walls around their home-built studio kit.

"We're very fortunate that they had things so well thought out that we could just follow the instructions," Neves said. "Do it, put it in, get in there, download the software and just go!"

Engineers found the exact software they'd need for actors like Neves and Matranga to be able to voice their parts directly to video. That way they can make sure their words are matching lips of the characters on screen in real time and make edits right on the iPad. It's a job usually reserved for engineers, but after weeks and months of troubleshooting, the pair say they know enough to get the job done.

"It can be challenging to do the acting part, then sorta turn that off and literally go into the engineering part," Matranga said. "Engineers are so underappreciated at times. There's no way it can exist without them."

The kits those engineers put together made it to 78 actors at first. After some initial success, that grew to 139 studios in Texas and across the country, piecing together content in an effort to release dubbed anime on time.

Now that regulations have eased up a bit, there's a healthy mix of actors coming into the studio and those still dubbing from home. Studio sessions feature mostly empty chairs, but the screens they're in front of are just as active as ever, as the engineers continue putting it all together from home.

“It’s less about trying to say we’ve got to figure out a way to get this stuff put together because that’s what this job needs,” Cook said. “It’s what we have to do.”