Blog Contact
Hi, I'm Brian Schwabauer

Delivering Delight

For as long as I can remember, I've loved to make things — short films, Flash games, websites, products. I live to create. I work to delight.

Today I'm the founder of Show&Tour, building software from Kansas City, where I live with my wife and our four kids. Twenty years of startups, apps, and videos got me here — but it didn't start with any of that.

Where it all started.

It started with a miniDV camera, a bedroom wall painted green, and a friend named Kevin. Keep scrolling to rewind twenty years.

Fast-forward to now
EVERYTHING I'VE MADETAPE 01 · 2006–TODAY
5

Act I · 2006–2011

The Film Kid

Kevin and I had one camcorder, endless weekends, and no idea what 'coverage' meant. We made films anyway.

The miniDV era

A bedroom, two kids,
and a tape that had to rewind.

My best friend Kevin and I had our families' miniDV cameras — the kind where you literally had to play the tape back into the computer in real time to digitize it. We had no filmmaking skills. We had no lights, no mics, no idea what a "script" was. But we had time, and that was the only thing the work required.

We called ourselves Hunky Spunky Productions. We were eleven.

PROBLEM

Setting up a tripod was hard. We thought we could film handheld — we couldn't. That meant one of us was always behind the camera. With only two of us, how do you make a film with only one character?

ANSWER

Film your stuffed animals.

Quanesha · 08.10.2006 — our first film. stuffed animal characters.

▌ The "slowmo" fight scene

Our first big special-effects idea: act a fight in slow motion, then speed it up in editing so we wouldn't actually hurt each other. It turns out humans cannot act believably in slow motion. The footage is ridiculous. We kept it anyway.

▌ Duct-tape special effects

A year after The Fight Scene we made Ninja Men. We pre-cut an apple, jammed a toothpick into it to hold it together, and let a karate chop "split" it cleanly. Seventh-grade ingenuity I'm still a little proud of.

Every weekend looked the same. I'd walk (through neighbors' yards) to Kevin's house. We'd come up with whatever crazy thing we could that day. We'd film it. We'd edit it. All within a day, sometimes two. Then we'd repeat that loop, over and over.

We upgraded our camera to one that recorded to a hard drive. We got a computer with actual editing software (we'd been editing directly on the camera before). We still didn't have lights or mics. But we started learning how to piece together multiple shots in a row to build a real narrative.

With our new software, we could finally start doing "special effects". The first one was speed manipulation. The second was greenscreen. Each project added a new tool to the toolbag. Each tool combined with the others to unlock the next one.

Early Technical Tests

Bedroom wall
painted neon green.

After painting a green screen on a bedroom wall, suddenly the possibilities felt infinite. We didn't know how to use a chroma key. We didn't know what "chroma key" was. We knew our editing software had a button labeled "green screen". That was enough.

So we wrote up a fake news broadcast. XYZ News was born — Brian as the anchor, Kevin as every other character. The lesson we learned that day is etched permanently into my brain: use a tripod when you use a green screen, or your anchor will float.

PAC-ATTACK

We figured out a trick. Our editing software couldn't animate things. But it could do greenscreen. So we built our animations in PowerPoint, on top of a bright green slide, exported the whole slideshow as a video, and keyed out the green. Suddenly we had a pacman chomping his way across real footage.

We wrote a whole short film around the trick. A group of friends watching TV. Pacman climbs out of the screen. Carnage ensues.

I also built a small Flash game to launch with the film — you played a pacman eating animated faces. It was the first time I wrote code and watched it become something on a screen.

INSERT COIN PLAYER 1 _
1

Animated in PowerPoint, exported to video, on a bright green slide.

2

Key out the green in our editor. Pacman now lives in real footage.

3

Bonus: a Flash game launched alongside the film. Eat the Brian-faces.

Discovering After Effects

Our video editing software couldn't take us further. So I picked up Adobe After Effects and started running tests — every VFX artist's rite of passage. Clone yourself. Build a lightsaber. Get hit by a car. Animate a logo.

Clone effect — twin Brians
Clone effect — twin Brians
Lightsaber, the obligatory VFX rite
Lightsaber, the obligatory VFX rite
Hit-by-car test
Hit-by-car test
Hit-by-car test, in a real film a year later
Hit-by-car test, in a real film a year later
Kevin as weatherman #1
Kevin as weatherman #1
Greenscreen blanket → vanishing trick
Greenscreen blanket → vanishing trick
AWC studio logo test
AWC studio logo test
Take One Films logo
Take One Films logo
Hunky Spunky Productions logo
Hunky Spunky Productions logo
Cleanplate rotoscope — chair, gone
Cleanplate rotoscope — chair, gone
Cleanplate rotoscope — shoe, gone
Cleanplate rotoscope — shoe, gone
Backyard Blockbusters

“FEATURE LENGTH” FILMS

We'd spent two summers on short films. We were ready for the big one — a Hollywood feature-length movie. We didn't know how long a script needed to be, so we wrote until we couldn't write anymore. It was too much work to invent characters or world-building, so we "borrowed" an existing IP. We were thirteen.

Power Rangers 360 (2007)

Thirty minutes long. Our first "feature". The blue ranger goes rogue, joins the villain Vino, fights the red ranger, and dies in his arms. Not a good film. But it taught us to aim way past what we could actually pull off — a habit that never wore off.

We held the film premiere in my backyard after sundown. We put white bed sheets over the windows to make a 20ft tall screen and a projector on a card table. It was a pretty big deal… at the time.

Premiere · summer 2007 · backyard cinema · ~40 friends and family
FROM POWER RANGERS 360 · 2007
ONE YEAR LATER
WE TRIED IT AGAIN — BIGGER

Power Rangers 360 II (2008)

The next summer it was time for BIGGER and BETTER. We spent weeks writing a 60+ page script and printed script binders for the whole cast — which by now was a small army of whichever friends were available.

It turns out it's pretty hard to make a 60+ minute film in the heat of summer, when everyone just wants to be at the pool. But we stuck it out. We had to pad the film with some unnecessary scenes and a very long credits reel, but we did it. We made a 64-minute film we could be proud of.

BEHIND THE SCENES
A real clapper this time
A real clapper this time
On set, take whatever
On set, take whatever
Stunt prep
Stunt prep
Yes, Zordon was played by a dog
Yes, Zordon was played by a dog
Flight comp, greenscreen
Flight comp, greenscreen
More set life
More set life
The PR360 II premiere projector setup
Premiere night · the backyard projector setup
Brian and Kevin at the PR360 II premiere
Brian and Kevin at the PR360 II premiere
FROM THE FILM
The charge
The charge
Blades out
Blades out
Red vs henchman
Red vs henchman
Flight, greenscreen
Flight, greenscreen
Through the clouds
Through the clouds
Vino, back from "the dead"
Vino, back from "the dead"
Profile shot
Profile shot
Landing
Landing
A Real Production Company
FROM FILM KID → WEB KID

Real companies
have websites.

We wanted Hunky Spunky Productions to feel like a real production company. We made t-shirts. We made hats. And of course — every real company has a website. So I went and bought our first domain name. I didn't really know what a domain name was. But I knew we needed one.

I fired up Apple's iWeb, which let me drag boxes onto a page and call it a website. It was perfect for someone who had no idea what HTML was. Pretty soon I outgrew it and moved to Adobe Dreamweaver. That meant I was actually writing code. Mostly badly. But I had crossed a line — I could make pixels do what I wanted, and the pixels could now do things on click.

Soon I was writing Flash. A custom Flash header for the homepage with faces that made funny expressions when you hovered them. Animated transitions between pages. Embedded films. A blog. Anything that felt "interactive" I tried to ram in.

www.hunkyspunky.com / 2008
www.hunkyspunky.com / 2009
www.hunkyspunky.com / 2010

A site for every film, eventually

When we released Calamity (a stop-motion lego film I'll get to in a later section), I built it its own little Flash website. It even had a Facebook "app" that embedded the same Flash player inside Facebook. Players could move a lego character around and watch its walk cycle animate. There were no objectives. No scoring. No win condition. That wasn't the point.

The point was: I could write code, and the code could make things appear on a screen. I was hooked. I have not really stopped since.

FLASH · 2009

Looking back: iWeb → Dreamweaver → Flash + ActionScript. The blog was a hand-rolled mess. The video player was a custom embed. The "CMS" was me, in Dreamweaver, on my home PC, FTP-ing pages up to shared hosting. There were no frameworks. No git. No package manager. I knew none of those words.

But the loop felt the same as it does now: write something, refresh the browser, see it on the screen. That feedback loop is the whole reason I do this.

Music Videos

When you don't
have a script,
follow the song.

The websites didn't replace the films — the two threads just started running in parallel. And on the film side, I was always drawn to music videos. You don't have to invent a plot or characters — you just get to mash a bunch of clips against a beat with quick cuts and clever transitions. We were not good musicians; the recordings live somewhere between "endearing" and "unlistenable", depending on the track. But they taught me so much about editing to tempo, about how a cut can land on a beat, about how a small change in audio completely changes what a viewer feels in a shot. I still cut everything differently because of those years.

Our first attempts were honestly just "stand in front of a tripod and lip-sync". By 2010 we'd graduated to writing the songs ourselves, recording in our own awful little home studio, and building a music video concept around the lyrics. The audio-mixing skills we built here later carried into the sound design of every short film.

33⅓2007—2010
Drop the needle

Flashlight · 2007

Our first original song, written and recorded with Kevin. A guy goes slowly insane searching for a flashlight he can't find. The music video has way more shots, way more quick cuts, and starts to actually feel like a music video.

Flashlight (2007)
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Do Da Flava G · 2010

We wrote a rap song for a friend, made him "into a rapper", filmed my whole family doing a goofy family dance to it — grandparents included — and shot the music video. It placed in a local film festival. I think second.

I also built a whole Flash website for the fake artist. There was a game on the site: press a number on the keyboard and the animated Flava G character would do that dance. We wrote four songs for him. We only ever shot a music video for one.

Do Da Flava G (2010)
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You Derive Me Crazy · 2010

AP Calculus had just wrapped, so my teacher let us be creative. We wrote a parody — set to Britney Spears' "You Drive Me Crazy" — with lyrics full of calc puns. Shot it in class, used greenscreen to put the whole class into virtual sets, and turned in the most absurd math project the school had ever seen.

You Derive Me Crazy (2010)
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Animation & Special Effects

Software gives you
superpowers.

Gone were the days of PowerPoint exports keyed onto live footage. By 2009 I was deep into After Effects and learning Cinema 4D / 3ds Max. The software let me build the things I could only dream of three years earlier. The "I can put anything on screen" feeling didn't go away. It still hasn't.

LEGO Calamity

Calamity is a stop-motion short about a town of lego men attacked by a clay monster. We built a city on the floor of my basement, set a ladder over the whole thing so we could lay across it without getting in shot, and moved each lego one frame at a time.

Then in After Effects, I painstakingly rotoscoped every character so I could replace the city behind them — explosions, fireballs, animated mouths, smoke, planes flying through the clouds. Every second has 3–4 VFX layers. It took an obscene amount of time.

FROM THE SHOT LIST
Lego soldiers firing on the clay monster in the city street
The army takes on the clay monster
A lego plane flying through composited clouds
Composited clouds for the flyover
First-person view from a lego plane flying through the city
The flyover from the cockpit
Third-person view of a lego plane flying through the city
The same pass, from outside
An animated radar screen visual effect
An animated radar screen, drawn in After Effects
A dialog scene with mouths animated onto the lego faces
Mouths animated on, frame by frame
Explosions composited into the lego city
Explosions painted in behind the roto
The clay monster blown up in a fireball
The monster finally goes up
Filming the lego city from a ladder
Behind the scenes — filming the city from a ladder
Timelapse of building the lego city
Behind the scenes — building the city, in timelapse
A lego scene set up in front of a greenscreen
Behind the scenes — some shots used greenscreen instead of roto

[ EXPOSURE ]

My most ambitious VFX project. A camera struck by lightning "comes alive", transforms into a Transformers-style robot, and chases a group of friends. They eventually defeat it by overexposing it — they shine all their lights directly at it and it overheats.

Over 250 hours went into the post-production. I modeled the camera robot from scratch in 3D, animated the transformation, tracked it to live footage, integrated lighting, added smoke.

We wanted to shoot in rain at night, but couldn't wait for the weather, so we filmed outside during the day and dunked the actors in water. The ground got soaked from a hose. I did day-to-night color conversion in post. It almost works.

For the robot's POV shots, I built a camera mount that strapped to an RC car. We drove it during the chase scene so it could get the low, weaving angle that a human couldn't.

The camera robot chasing Kevin down a street
The robot runs Kevin down
The camera robot overheating and transforming back into a camera
Overexposed — it overheats and folds back into a camera
The camera robot scanning a house, rendered as a 3D wireframe
Scanning the house in 3D
The camera robot firing a DV tape with a 3D bullet-time effect
Bullet-time — a DV tape modeled in 3D, fired in slow motion
First-person view of the camera robot chasing the actors
The chase from the robot’s own POV
Wireframe of the 3D camera model
The camera, modeled from scratch — wireframe

XYZ News · iPrez

The XYZ News bit, again — three years on. By 2011 our skills were "professional" enough that it could've passed for a real Onion segment at the time. A 3D virtual newsroom set with actual jib-style camera moves. Proper greenscreen lighting. The whole thing centered around one fake story: a new iPhone app for the U.S. president that gives him unlimited power.

This is, embarrassingly, still one of the funnier things I've ever made.

Brian on greenscreen, raw shot The finished 3D virtual newsroom composite GREENSCREEN ON AIR
Festivals · KSMS · Live TV
20 + awards won at film festivals · 2008–2011

Kevin and I submitted everything, everywhere, every year.

Where the run started

Yard Sale (2009) — the one I was most proud of

Almost no dialogue. A guy holds a yard sale and tries to get rid of his stuffed animals. The stuffed animals come to life. They are not pleased. He flees. They chase. The film ends with an inflatable penguin pecking him on the face and a cut to black.

Some shots used stop-motion. Some used hidden puppeting. I tried to mix them in a way you couldn't tell. In the climax, twenty-plus animals all stop-motion together. The shot took so long that a nearby tree's shadow moves across the screen faster than the animals do. I still laugh at that.

YARD SALE · 8 STILLS
The setup
The setup
The pile
The pile
Stop-motion stuffed animals
Stop-motion stuffed animals
All 20+ at once
All 20+ at once
Attack scene
Attack scene
Run to the car
Run to the car
Hit-by-car effect, lifted from earlier
Hit-by-car effect, lifted from earlier
The penguin gets the last peck
The penguin gets the last peck
[ KSMS · THE VOICE OF SHAWNEE MISSION SOUTH ]

Inside the
control room.

KSMS was my high school's broadcast journalism program. We made news packages, sports features, comedy sketches — everything.

SITE

The KSMS website

I built two versions: an animated, interactive Flash version that won "Best Interactive Site" at a local competition, then a WordPress version once Flash started its slow death so future students could keep updating it.

GAME

Flash Video Game

A Flash game where you play as a teacher defending the building from astronauts by shooting tennis balls. With actual scoring this time. The furthest I'd gotten on a complete game.

EXPERIMENT

"Hall View"

Google Street View, but for our school. I walked around with a camera, shot 360-stitched panoramas at every hallway junction, then built a minimap-based viewer so you could click a dot to "stand" at that point. QuickTime did the actual panorama rendering.

LIVE · The KSMS sports broadcast rig

Probably my favorite KSMS memory. We brought live broadcasts to our sports events — before YouTube had livestreams. I wired a row of cameras into an analog video switcher, ran that into an analog-to-digital converter, and pushed the output through some random live streaming service.

Each camera also fed a tape deck that recorded its input to a DV tape — that was our "instant replay" rig. When something happened we wanted to replay, we'd rewind, hit play on the deck, and switch the live broadcast to that input. Sometimes it worked. When it worked, it felt like magic.

Signal path gym floor → the internet
  1. Cameras 2–3 of them
  2. Switcher push a button to cut
  3. Tape decks one per camera
  4. A/D analog out, digital in
  5. Laptop to a streaming service
Program basketball vs SM-NW · 2011
KSMS live broadcast · basketball vs SM-NW (2011)
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FROM THE BOOTH · 4 STILLS
Custom intro animation
Custom intro animation
The booth
The booth
Instant replay
Instant replay
Sideline reporter
Sideline reporter

KSMS Block Party — the senior-year finale

A live, SNL-style variety show in our school auditorium. Months of preparation. A full live audience. Multi-camera coverage. Pre-recorded sketches. Stand-up. Improv. A live band. A custom motion-graphics package. Everything KSMS had taught us, in one night.

Block Party trailer (2011)
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Source
THE BLOCK PARTY · 7 PHOTOS
Block Party · live show #1
Block Party · live show #1
Block Party · live show #2
Block Party · live show #2
Block Party · live show #3
Block Party · live show #3
Block Party · live show #4
Block Party · live show #4
Block Party · live show #5
Block Party · live show #5
Block Party · live show #6
Block Party · live show #6
Block Party · live show #7
Block Party · live show #7

A MidWestSide Story (2010)

A parody short film for KSMS about life in the midwest. Just a fun one with Kevin and a handful of KSMS regulars.

A MidWestSide Story (2010)
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Long Time No See (2011)

Kevin and I were headed to different colleges, so we made what we thought was our last film together that summer. A fish-out-of-water comedy about a guy meeting his foreign-raised long-lost brother. Lighter on effects, heavier on story. Our best storytelling at that point.

Long Time No See (2011)
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Prod
Real life
Scene
Film school
Take
2
Director
B. Schwabauer
Date
2012

Act II · 2012–2015

The Pivot

I went to film school and made the biggest films of my life. But the tool I kept reaching for was a code editor.

Missouri State · Electronic Arts

Four years of "go make something."

I majored in Electronic Arts — a multidisciplinary major covering video production, audio production, animation, and interactive design — with a minor in Computer Science. Pretty much the perfect match for a kid who'd been combining all of those things in his basement since he was eleven.

Facebook in Real Life (2012)

A short film I made to try a face-tracked graphics technique: what if Facebook was real life? A character starts college; everyone around him has a floating Facebook status above their head; people speak in social-media tone, "like" each other's comments out loud, etc.

The shoot was an excuse to learn face tracking and HUD compositing. The script was an excuse for the shoot.

EXPERIMENTAL

NODE — a 360° short film, in 2014

"Make something cool and impressive," our ART 300 professor said. So my group made a 360-degree panoramic short film. In 2014. When you couldn't buy a 360 camera, when YouTube didn't support 360 video, when "360 rig" wasn't a thing you could rent.

THE RIG
  1. Strap four GoPros to a square toothpaste box on a light stand.
  2. Box happens to be the perfect dimensions for 90° horizontal FOV per camera.
  3. Start all four cameras. Clap loudly. Use the audio waveform to sync them all.
  4. Act it out. The character moves through the space; the audience can look anywhere.
  5. Export each angle to PNG sequences. Photoshop's batch panorama-stitch each frame.
  6. Build a custom WebGL viewer (three.js) where a video plays on the inside of a 3D sphere.
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brianschwabauer.com/node NODE — the WebGL 360 player I built (2014)

A 360 video is only half the problem. You also have to guide the viewer. At certain timecodes I disable the keyboard, smoothly animate the camera to a target azimuth + FOV (with easing), then release control back to the user. I also added a CSS letterbox overlay to force a 2.35 aspect ratio across the whole webpage — surprisingly fiddly in 2014.

Bear Bus Bash — my first "finished" game

A Flash bus-driving game where you pick up MSU campus bus passengers, collect coins, and dodge other cars. There are levels for each real MSU campus route, three drivers with different stats, and a real scoring + achievements system. A teammate hand-drew all the art. I did the programming, animation, and most of the motion graphics.

Flash couldn't really do 3D in 2013, so I faked depth with scaled 2D sprites and crossfade swaps of the bus model from different angles. Clunky, but believable.

PickVid (2014) — a tiny social app

Another group project in the same class. Idea: a group of friends downloads the app and gets a prompt ("take a sad selfie", "take a picture of something funny"). Everyone uploads their photo to a shared S3 bucket. The app stitches all the photos into a single hollywood-style movie trailer with intense music and explosions — your friends as the cast. We shipped a working prototype.

Fugue — my first 48-hour film (2014)

Fugue was my first crack at SATO 48 — the region's 48-hour film race. You're handed a genre, a prop, and a line of dialogue at kickoff, then get 48 sleepless hours to write, shoot, score, and cut a finished short. It taught me how much you can actually pull off in two days — and set up the bigger swing I took the next year.

Fugue (2014) — 48-hour film
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Split Life — a 48-hour film, in stereo (2015)

The next year, back at SATO 48, I wanted to do something nobody had done before. So I made a film with two oner-shot perspectives, shown side-by-side at the same time, in real time. One: the protagonist leaves her house. Two: a man hidden outside breaks in while she's gone. She comes back. He gets stuck. They turn out to know each other. It ends.

To make the two shots line up frame-perfect over multiple minutes, I built a master spreadsheet of every event in the film with exact timecodes. I then recorded my own voice giving every cue ("3, 2, 1, open the door") at those exact timecodes, and blasted that audio through the house during filming so every actor and operator knew exactly what should be happening.

The actors had to be at exact locations at exact times. Plus a handful of hidden cuts I had to fix in VFX. Plus I scored the music myself, late at night, on the deadline. Plus all the cue audio had to be replaced in post.

The story is okay. The lighting is okay. The script is okay. But I did the thing I set out to do, which was: invent a new kind of edit. I'm still proud of that.

Split Life (2015) — 48-hour dual-perspective oner
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A WHIRLWIND OF CLASS PROJECTS — THE CAMERA ROLL
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — chase scene
MED 365 — chase scene
Facebook in Real Life — everyone "likes" a post
Facebook in Real Life — everyone "likes" a post
MED 365 — Complexity
MED 365 — Complexity
Premier Studios internship — the interns
Premier Studios internship — the interns
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — Target shoot
Premier Studios internship — green screen shoot
Premier Studios internship — green screen shoot
Premier Studios internship — green screen shoot
Premier Studios internship — green screen shoot
Premier Studios internship — flash mob shoot
Premier Studios internship — flash mob shoot
First place at the Live Life Green festival
First place at the Live Life Green festival
ART 230 final — stop motion
ART 230 final — stop motion
Filming the dorm talent show
Filming the dorm talent show
Ditch the Pitch
Ditch the Pitch
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set

Other films from these years:

Katie Bauer's Breakup 2014

Directing-class group film. I script-supervised, edited, and did the VFX. The character realizes she's inside a film and tries to escape it; boom mic crashes the frame on purpose.

Katie Bauer's Breakup (2014)
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One Up 2014

Cinematography-class short. Two guys try to one-up each other to land the same job. Real lighting setups, real coverage.

One Up (2014)
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Nice to Meet You 2014

The senior-thesis tech rehearsal: Canon RAW on a 5D mkIII with Magic Lantern firmware. A guy chats up a girl on a park bench, not realizing she's on the phone — and her half of the call happens to answer him perfectly. The title is the punchline.

Nice to Meet You (2014)
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Legacy 2015

A quiet 2-character short for my directing class. A husband obsessed with his career, a wife who wants him home. Conversation as conflict.

Legacy (2015)
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End of an era
CLOSING CREDITS · CHILDHOOD

Hunky Spunky's Oscars.

By 2013, Kevin and I were two years into college in two different states — him at Baylor, me at Missouri State. Hunky Spunky Productions, the version with our childhood in it, was over, and we both knew it. We were never going to make films together again. That deserved more than a quiet fade-out.

So we came home that summer and sent it off the only way we knew how: The Spunksters — an awards show, modeled after the Oscars, for ourselves and our films. Awards in every category. Speeches. Live-streamed. Projected on the side of my childhood house — the same wall the Power Rangers premieres had played on. Forty friends in the backyard, watching a live video feed of Kevin hosting from inside, so the host appeared on a twenty-foot tall projection like a giant.

A SMALL, RIDICULOUS THING I'M PROUD OF

An SMS feature, hacked together because Google Voice doesn't have an API.

I wanted viewers to be able to text in their reactions and have them appear on the projected wall. Google Voice didn't (and doesn't) expose an API. But it can forward incoming texts to email. So: text → Google Voice → email → my little polling script → OBS overlay. Untested until the moment it had to work. It worked.

I deeply believe in this: live life all the way through, even the parts that don't matter. Backyard awards shows are nothing. It's so much more fun to take them seriously than to phone them in.

9:41 PM · The Spunksters · live
  • +1 (913) ••• 4451
    this is HILARIOUS
  • +1 (816) ••• 8210
    Why is Zordon a dog
  • +1 (913) ••• 2199
    cried laughing at the PR3 trailer
  • +1 (785) ••• 0772
    I love this so much
  • +1 (816) ••• 5621
    Brian and Kevin forever ❤️
  • +1 (913) ••• 9088
    Oscars who?
BEHIND THE SCENES · 8 PHOTOS

Bubbly Bros — the unofficial encore

For the show, Kevin and I wrote a song called "Bubbly Bros". A rap song about two guys who love blowing bubbles. It sounds like a constant innuendo. It is not. We're really just rapping about bubbles.

We ran out of time to shoot a real music video, so we did a photo shoot, set it to the song, and called it done. It got cheers from a backyard. It belongs there.

A fake Power Rangers III trailer

For The Spunksters we also cut a fake trailer for a "Power Rangers III". An adult Kevin — the blue ranger from our childhood movies — has not let his glory days go. The other rangers have grown up. They have kids. They have jobs. Kevin doesn't. The trailer ends with a gag where the words "in 3D" break the letterbox bars. It still kills me.

END OF THE HUNKY SPUNKY CHAPTER We never made another film together. That was the point.

Meanwhile Nothing big shipped this year — just film sets, coursework, and a growing pile of notes, all quietly pointed at one thing: the senior thesis.

Senior Thesis
MBEA · 1st Place · Screenwriting

WHAT MAKES
US HUMAN

A short film about teleportation, identity, and what gets left behind.

SYNOPSIS

Eve, a journalist, is digging into a new teleportation technology when she's forced to use a teleporter in an emergency. The machine works by scanning your body at the molecular level, transmitting the data, and "printing" you on the other end — then destroying the original. The public doesn't know that last part.

The power flickers mid-scan. The machine prints a new Eve but fails to destroy the old one. Now there are two of her, and the company has reasons to make sure nobody finds out. She eventually exposes the secret to the world.

The question the film never quite answers: if a perfect 1:1 copy of you exists, is the original still "you"? What does this technology do to the meaning of being a person? We didn't try to solve that on screen. We tried to let it sit in your stomach.

FROM THE FILM
WATCH THE FULL FILM · 15 MIN
What Makes Us Human (2015) — full senior thesis short
0:00 / 0:00
CONCEPT ART · PRE-PRODUCTION
Telescan headquarters · concept art
Telescan headquarters · concept art
Disposal room
Disposal room
The teleporter
The teleporter
Hi-tech restraints
Hi-tech restraints
Eye-recorder UI
Eye-recorder UI
THE POSTER SERIES

Part of treating it like a real release: a set of one-sheets — including an in-world Times cover we mocked up as a prop for the film itself.

What Makes Us Human — minimalist poster
The minimalist cut
What Makes Us Human — villain poster
The villain one-sheet
What Makes Us Human — villain on a mocked-up Times magazine cover
In-world prop — the villain on a Times cover
15
minutes long
20+
script revisions
~$5k
crowdfunded on Indiegogo
∞
favors called in

We approached it like a Hollywood film.

A 15-minute short, but with craft services, extras, multiple locations, a casting call, an Indiegogo fundraising campaign, real camera rigs, multiple revisions on the script over months of preproduction. Not because we needed all of that to deliver — but because we wanted to know what it felt like to actually do it.

Premiere · MSU Electronic Arts Showcase · May 2015

The end of college. A theater. A crowd. The film ran. People reacted to the beats we'd been building toward for almost a year. It's still the biggest film production I've ever been a part of — and now that I build software instead of films, the biggest I ever will be.

act_3.md
~/brianschwabauer/act_3.md

Act III · 2016–Today

The Builder

Freelancer · Wedding Films · Brand Work
POST-GRAD HUSTLE

I bought
business cards.

College ended. I was freelancing full time. New site. New cards. A whole 2015 demo reel cut specifically to land me freelance gigs. I was technically a "videographer", but in practice the gigs would shape-shift — sometimes it was a logo animation, sometimes a Kickstarter video, sometimes a promotional motion-graphics piece, sometimes a wedding film, sometimes a WordPress theme.

Most freelance videographers eventually get to wedding films. I did too. Kevin and I tried to spin a wedding business out of it called Schwikes — I'd shoot, he'd DJ. It didn't really work. The wedding films themselves did, though.

THE 2015 DEMO REEL · 1:32

Ten years of work. Ninety seconds.

By 2015 I had almost a decade behind me — short films, music videos, motion graphics, VFX, wedding films, brand work. This is the reel I cut from all of it. It's still the fastest way to see what these years actually looked like.

Brian Schwabauer — 2015 demo reel
0:00 / 0:00

The pieces behind it

The work the reel was cut from, and the years around it — logo animations, promos, campaign videos, client sites, the sets they were shot on, and the gear I built because I couldn't afford to buy it:

My own logo, animated over a sunset timelapse — the open of the 2015 reel
My own logo, animated over a sunset timelapse — the open of the 2015 reel
Missouri Reverse Transfer · animated character and graphics for a State of Missouri program
Missouri Reverse Transfer · animated character and graphics for a State of Missouri program
Missouri Reverse Transfer · logo animation
Missouri Reverse Transfer · logo animation
DecisionFX · logo animation for a Kansas City data-collection company
DecisionFX · logo animation for a Kansas City data-collection company
URSA Experience · promo animation for MSU's first-year summer program
URSA Experience · promo animation for MSU's first-year summer program
Engage Mobile · a 5-year anniversary piece built from one icon of every app they'd shipped
Engage Mobile · a 5-year anniversary piece built from one icon of every app they'd shipped
EngageCloud Solutions · logo animation
EngageCloud Solutions · logo animation
Humane Society of Southwest Missouri · logo animation
Humane Society of Southwest Missouri · logo animation
121 Live · logo animation for the Kickstarter video
121 Live · logo animation for the Kickstarter video
121 Live · animated product demo — private live streams, shared anywhere
121 Live · animated product demo — private live streams, shared anywhere
121 Live · app UI animated for the campaign
121 Live · app UI animated for the campaign
121 Live · phone screen replaced in post, frame by frame
121 Live · phone screen replaced in post, frame by frame
121 Live · a 360 capture, mapped to a sphere
121 Live · a 360 capture, mapped to a sphere
"Met You" by Tamish · official music video — another videographer shot it, I did the post
"Met You" by Tamish · official music video — another videographer shot it, I did the post
Net Price Calculator · a typography piece for the U.S. Department of Education's video contest. First place
Net Price Calculator · a typography piece for the U.S. Department of Education's video contest. First place
ADPi recruitment · the fountain jump, in slow motion
ADPi recruitment · the fountain jump, in slow motion
ADPi recruitment · dancing, laughing, fireworks
ADPi recruitment · dancing, laughing, fireworks
Holy Cross Lutheran · a t-shirt commercial, complete with an angel
Holy Cross Lutheran · a t-shirt commercial, complete with an angel
Schwikes Studios · the pricing graphics for the wedding business Kevin and I tried to start
Schwikes Studios · the pricing graphics for the wedding business Kevin and I tried to start
One Part Laugh, One Part Life · website design for a podcast
One Part Laugh, One Part Life · website design for a podcast
On set · filming an interview for the Beheadstrong promo
On set · filming an interview for the Beheadstrong promo
On set · the Humane Society promo shoot
On set · the Humane Society promo shoot
On set · the Humane Society promo shoot, other side of the room
On set · the Humane Society promo shoot, other side of the room
On set · the One Year Adventure Novel promo shoot
On set · the One Year Adventure Novel promo shoot
On set · a church video, lit properly for once
On set · a church video, lit properly for once
On set · shooting a CrossFit competition
On set · shooting a CrossFit competition
On set · sports at Missouri State
On set · sports at Missouri State

Wedding films

I shot plenty of them for other couples. But the one I'm proudest of is the one I was standing in: Jordan and I got married in June 2015, and I cut our own highlight film.

The bride, before the doors open
The bride, before the doors open
The walk down the aisle
The walk down the aisle
A smile caught between takes
A smile caught between takes
The reception, once the dancing starts
The reception, once the dancing starts
Maggie & Brian, 2013 · a frame from their film
Maggie & Brian, 2013 · a frame from their film
On set · working around the group photo
On set · working around the group photo
On set · a wedding in a very large church
On set · a wedding in a very large church

Sites I built and archived

Three client sites, preserved exactly as they shipped:

cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · Schwikes
Entrepreneurship

I stopped
selling time.
I started building things.

Somewhere in this stretch I stopped thinking of myself as a freelancer and started thinking of myself as an entrepreneur. I wanted to build products, not deliver projects. I wanted to make things that could keep running without me there. Some worked. Some didn't. Almost all of them taught me a thing I used in the next one.

2016

Tower of the Americas — a kiosk companion app

I was hired to build an immersive companion app for The Tower of the Americas (in San Antonio). The idea: visitors get a tablet on a kiosk mount, point it where they're looking out the windows, and the app shows them a 360 panorama with landmark labels they can tap to learn more.

I went up the tower, shot photos in every direction, stitched them into a massive 360 panorama, and built the whole thing in Angular. The tablet's compass tracked which way it was pointed and matched that to the panorama angle. Tap a landmark, get a video and info card.

2017–2019

TapNotion — gamified training for restaurants

A swipe-based flashcard game to onboard waiters and bartenders. A restaurant owner sets up their menu and drinks in an admin dashboard, then invites new hires. The new hire learns through a quick flashcard game with left/right swipes, points for correct answers, points for speed, and immediate review of anything they got wrong. Owners see employee progress in the dashboard.

2017–2018

Wyoti — partnered WordPress agency

Spun out of the Engagement Grower work — I partnered with Wyoti to build custom WordPress sites and plugins for clients.

engagementgrower.com ARCHIVED · Engagement Grower

Meanwhile Heads-down year: client work paying the bills while the idea that became Show&Tour kept getting sketched and re-sketched.

CO-FOUNDER

Show&Tour Logo Show&Tour

The best way to deliver real estate media.

Josh and I started Show&Tour in 2019. It's a project delivery platform for real estate photographers — beautiful property websites, branded delivery pages, smart invoicing, and a workflow built around how photographers actually work.

Everything else on this page was practice for this. A decade of shipping other people's projects, a string of products that almost worked — and then the one that stuck.

showandtour.com

The pitch, in six bullets

01

Delivery Pages

Premium project delivery experiences where clients can download files, pay invoices, and view licensing — all branded as the photographer.

02

Property Websites

MLS-compliant virtual tours and property sites with thoughtful, beautiful layouts.

03

Pay-to-Download

Optional gate that requires clients to pay the invoice before downloading the media. Never get paid late again.

04

White-labeled

Your brand, your domain, your SSL, your terms. We sit invisibly behind it.

05

Integrations

QuickBooks, Stripe, Square. Invoices stay synced across the tools photographers already use.

06

Unlimited

Unlimited property sites, deliveries, and clients. No per-seat math.

Brand

The identity the whole product is dressed in.

On a laptop
On a laptop
App icon
App icon
Marketing site
Marketing site
Business cards
Business cards
Instagram ad
Instagram ad
Brand guide cover
Brand guide cover

Still building Show&Tour.

Show&Tour is my full-time work, today and for the foreseeable future. Thousands of photographers deliver their projects through it, and the roadmap is longer than it has ever been. Six years in, it still gets the best hours of my day.

Visit showandtour.com

delightstack

A full-stack toolkit for building delightful apps on Cloudflare.

Twenty years of building things leaves you with opinions about how software should feel. Delightstack is where mine ended up: Svelte 5 components, edge-native auth, a reactive database on Durable Objects, real-time websockets, image processing, billing, AI — eleven packages designed to work together and usable on their own. It runs under this site, under my side projects, and under everything I start now.

  • @delightstack/ components Svelte 5 component library
  • @delightstack/ styles OKLCH design tokens & base CSS
  • @delightstack/ utilities shared utilities & DelightError
  • @delightstack/ editor rich-text block editor
  • @delightstack/ auth edge-native sessions & OAuth
  • @delightstack/ database reactive SQLite on Durable Objects
  • @delightstack/ websocket real-time presence & messaging
  • @delightstack/ rate-limiter sliding-window rate limiting
  • @delightstack/ images image processing & uploads
  • @delightstack/ ai embeddings, gateway, streaming
  • @delightstack/ stripe billing & metered usage
thedelight.co docs.thedelight.co

…and whatever else I feel like building.

Nights, weekends, and the occasional all-consuming obsession. None of these are finished, because none of them are abandoned — this list only grows.

scrmbld.app — a daily word game in split-flap style

You're given 8 letters. One is a decoy. Unscramble the other 7 into the day's word. Letters animate on like a split-flap display — I spent a stupid amount of time hand-crafting the look and feel of that animation.

5 shots

markable.page

A PDF planner builder for e-ink tablets.

Generates deeply customizable planner PDFs with working internal links, built for devices like the reMarkable. Started life as “Remarkably Organized”; now open source, with 200+ stars on GitHub.

Visit markable.page

ghtui

A fast, minimal terminal UI for GitHub.

Triage your notification inbox without leaving the terminal. Open pull requests, comment, review, merge — all keyboard-first, no browser tab required.

ghtui on GitHub
2 shots

Video Curator

Intelligent curation for action-camera footage.

Works through huge volumes of video on its own: drops the pocket shots, surfaces the clips and stills worth keeping, and finds the moments where the kids are laughing. Mostly aimed at GoPro footage from family trips.

videocurator on GitHub
OFF THE CLOCK

When I'm not shipping, I'm in Kansas City with my wife and our four kids — building them a treehouse, camping, out on a run, or halfway through the next DIY renovation. I play guitar and write songs. I 3D-print things we could've just bought. The projects don't stop when I close the laptop; they just change material.

The materials keep changing. The rules don't.

THE CREED

Everything on this page
comes down to four things.

I started this page in 2006 with a stuffed-animal puppet show on a miniDV tape. I'm wrapping it up with a platform that pays my bills. Strip away the twenty years in between — the Flash games, the fake newscasts, the music videos, the startups — and this is what's left. The four things I actually believe.

  1. Details matter.

    If I want someone to care about what I make, I have to care first — all the way down to the details nobody will ever notice. Everything I do, I do with intention.

    You read this tiny line. See? The details get noticed.

  2. Make it beautiful.

    For all of human history we've cared how things look. The paintings and the cathedrals we refuse to let go of are the beautiful ones. Beauty isn't decoration on top of the work — it's part of why the work lasts.

  3. Do things that don't matter.

    The lego stop-motion. The Pacman PowerPoint trick. The treehouse in the backyard. None of it "mattered" — and every bit of it became a tool I used later on something that did. The loop hasn't changed: pick a thing I've never done. Try it. Fail in public. Add it to the toolbag. Use it on the next thing that matters more.

    psst — try clicking. it won't accomplish anything.

  4. Nothing is ever final.

    Every project on this page was the "final" version of something — right up until the next one. The kid with the camcorder became the kid with a copy of Flash became the guy with a compiler, and none of them were done. I will never write "final" on a filename, and I mean that as a philosophy: the work continues, the tools change, the story keeps going.

    homepage_final.svelte

Twenty years in, and the plan hasn't changed. I live to create. I work to delight.

— Brian

The End

BRIAN SCHWABAUER · 2006 – ∞

DELIVERING DELIGHT

Written, directed, and lived by

Brian Schwabauer

Executive producers

Mom & Dad (who taught me the value of hard work)

Starring

Jordan, my lovely wife (whose overwhelming support means more to me than can be put into words)

Craft services

also Jordan (the delightful-food department)

Co-producer

Kevin Sikes (19 short films, zero budgets)

Boom operator

Matthew Schwabauer, younger brother (always willing to tag along)

Filmed on location in

the backyard · the basement · Missouri State University · Texas · Kansas City

Shot on

MiniDV · four GoPros · Canon 60D · any camera I could find · coffee

In loving memory of

Russell Sikes (whose encouragement was the fuel I needed when things were hard)

In loving memory of

Adobe Flash, 1996–2020 gone, but still loading… 87%

This website was shot entirely on Svelte 5 and Cloudflare.

Built by the director.

View source: github.com/brianschwabauer/brianschwabauer.com

Based on a true story. All of it, unfortunately.

No pixels were harmed in the making of this website.

The following life has been rated

D — Delightful

Some scenes of excessive craft

The director would like to thank YOU —
for scrolling all twenty years.

FIN

Brian Schwabauer will return

in: whatever gets built next.

Delivering delight as a software engineer, creator, entrepreneur.

© 2026 Brian Schwabauer. All rights reserved.