BrianHKim

Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit! From the 100th episode. It was my first big project on the show and I was just an assistant to the main composer (John Swihart) at the time. But Swihart knew I had a big musical theater background and felt like this was a good chance to see what I was made of. So I worked very closely with Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, and choreographer Zach Woodlee of Glee, and we tinkered away at this one song for like two months, and then had a huge recording session at my favorite studio in LA, and I got to play piano on the song and sing backup vocals and oh man... for a young guy in his 20s who had just moved to LA not that long before, it was such a dream.

Hey guys I'm here let's do this thing

Probably not? It was a very tricky track to put together, because the singer (Agnes Shin) is in South Korea, and it was a lot of tough scheduling to put together.

But I'm not going to say 100% no. Who knows where this road will take me, maybe someday in the future it will become necessary and crucial? But right now, no plans.

It depends! Like 90% of the time I'm one of the last people to see an episode, so all the animation is done and the edit is locked to time (meaning they're not going to make any more timing changes to picture). So all the storyboarding and stuff has happened WAYYY earlier, like sometimes a year earlier.

BUT. If there's a song, or some kind of music that the characters dance to -- basically anything where the animation has to be timed to music -- then I get started at the storyboard stage. I'll get sent PDFs or a short movie file of the segment, and then I'll compose something, and then me and the artists go back and forth about how it's working or not working.

Like one that may have flown under the radar for you guys -- the Pie Island episode, where Star sees all the Pie Folk making pies, there's kind of this Stomp-style track of boots and dough squishes and brooms and stuff that's all to rhythm. I had to make that track to the storyboard animatic, so the animators knew what sounds they'd have to animate.

Daron is an unabashed Sailor Moon fan, so a lot of our early discussions were about that show and how it used certain instruments and sounds. And that led to a deep dive in a lot of anime from that period, and also me just watching lots of shows (anime or not) that I felt lent itself toward that kind of heightened style and emotion. So I think for me, the biggest inspirations were: 1) retro anime, particularly Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2; 2) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show, not movie, though I love the movie, RIP Luke Perry); 3) Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke; 4) Lost.

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As for favorite piece in the show, right now I'm pretty partial to the whole closing sequence in the finale, from the portals onward.