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.
Hi, I'm Brian Schwabauer
Delivering Delight
For as long as I have lived, I have loved to create. I've built startups, developed apps, and produced videos. I live to create. I work to delight.
What I'm up to
Show&Tour
The best way to deliver real estate media.
I'm full-time building Show&Tour : a project-delivery platform for real estate photographers. Beautiful property websites, branded delivery pages, smart invoicing — the whole workflow built around how photographers actually work. Thousands of users and counting.
Rewind the tape
Where it all started.
That's today. But none of it started with a company. It started with a miniDV camera, a bedroom wall painted green, and a friend named Kevin. Keep scrolling to rewind twenty years.
2026
The miniDV era
A bedroom, two kids,
and a tape that had to rewind.
My best friend Kevin and I were equipped with our family's 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.
▌ 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.
▌ Pre-school 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.
The vault — every short, in order
These are bad. Some of them are wonderful-bad. They are where every other section of this page came from.
- № 01 2006-08-10 private
Quanesha
No script. No actors. Just two kids and a pile of stuffed animals.
- № 02 2006-08-30 private
Bobby McQueen
A third friend joins. The plot? Mostly Turbana, a guy in a comically large turban.
- № 03 2006-10-21 private
The Fight Scene
We tried to act in slow motion so we could "speed it up" later. It does not work.
- № 04 2006-12-22 private
Super Swatter 3001
A class assignment "invention" — a 3-headed fly swatter — sold via fake infomercial.
- № 05 2007-01-05 private
Noggin Saver
Kevin's invention: a device that stops chairs from tipping over.
- № 06 2007-09-09 private
Ninja Men
A year later. Pre-cut apple + toothpick = a karate-chop split that holds up.
- № 07 2007-09-06 private
Spatula Story
A quest. For a spatula. Don't ask.
- № 08 2008-02-23 private
Rush for an Idea
Our first film with a real script. Greenscreen, a soundtrack, multiple takes.
- № 09 2008-02-29 private
02.29.08
Newspaper contest: a 29-second short for leap day. Got 2nd place — and taught us quick cuts.
Every weekend looked the same. I'd ride over 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, which is its own section below. Each project added a new tool to the toolbag. Each tool combined with the others to unlock the next one. That stacking is the entire story of this page, really.
Around this time I noticed I had a real knack for the technical side. Kevin was the better actor, so he started to act more. I started to film more. That split has basically held to this day.
Early Technical Tests
Bedroom wall
painted neon green.
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.
XYZ News, Episode I
The funniest thing we'd ever made, by a country mile.
Floating anchor — turns out you need a tripod
Same thumbs-up bug, different shot
Kevin as weatherman #1
Greenscreen blanket → vanishing trick
Kevin, also wearing a frisbee
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 my first real taste of programming creating something on screen. I never forgot it.
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 editor couldn't take us further. So I picked up 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
Lightsaber, the obligatory VFX rite
Hit-by-car test
Same effect, in a real film a year later
AWC studio logo test
Take One Films logo
Hunky Spunky Productions logo
Nuisance-B-Gone
Once I learned After Effects had a "rotoscope" capability, I had to test it. Cut out a chair before it vanishes. Cut out a shoe. Stay locked-off on a tripod and let the trick do the work. We turned the test into a fake infomercial.
The pitch
Chair, gone
Shoe, gone
Sideline Huddler
My sister Amanda "invented" a warm blanket with a waterproof shell for outdoor sports — basically a Snuggie you could take outside, before Snuggies existed. We made her a fake commercial that put her into rain, snow, and fire via green screen.
This was the pattern: we picked an effect we'd never done before. We dove right in. No research, no tutorials. We learned by failing in public. With each film we added another tool to the box.
The "everything I make is a thinly disguised pretext to try one new technical thing" loop never really left me. Pac-Attack was about a greenscreen trick. Nuisance-B-Gone was about cleanplate rotoscope. The "Calamity" film a year later (next section over) was about stop-motion. Everything was an excuse.
Feature Length
PROJECT 02 · A FULL-LENGTH FILM, ALMOST
POWER RANGERS 360
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. We didn't want to invent characters or world-building, so we borrowed an existing IP. We were thirteen.
RED
played by Brian
BLUE
played by Kevin
YELLOW
played by Emma
WHITE
played by Amanda
Power Rangers 360 (2007)
Thirty minutes. Our first "feature". The blue ranger goes rogue, joins the villain Vino, fights the red ranger, dies in his arms. Our friends gave up their summer to be in it.
We held the premiere in my backyard. Bed sheets over the windows, a projector on a borrowed light stand, sundown. The "screen" was 20 feet tall. It was the biggest moment of either of our lives at that point.
Premiere · summer 2007 · backyard cinema · ~40 friends and family
ONE YEAR LATER
WE TRIED IT AGAIN — BIGGER
WE TRIED IT AGAIN — BIGGER
Power Rangers 360 II (2008)
We spent weeks writing. The script hit 60+ pages, printed into binders and handed out to a cast that, by then, had grown to a small army of friends. The result was 64 minutes long — counting the credits and a handful of scenes we left way too long because we were chasing a runtime. Worth it.
Zordon, the rangers' leader, was played by Kevin's dog. We filmed him "talking" via peanut butter and comped him into the scene with — what else — greenscreen.
BEHIND THE SCENES
A real clapper this time
On set, take whatever
Stunt prep
Yes, Zordon was played by a dog
Flight comp, greenscreen
More set life
FROM THE FILM
The charge
Blades out
Red vs henchman
Flight, greenscreen
Through the clouds
Vino, back from "the dead"
Profile shot
Landing
Filming day after day in midwestern August heat is a different kind of work. By week three, everyone is tired. Performances slip. Composition slips. Patience slips. We learned to plan harder. We learned what call sheets were for. We learned what an actual production day's energy looks like. None of that is in a film school book — you can only learn it by doing it.
Looking back, neither of these movies is good. But I'm still proud of them. They were the first time we tried something that should have been out of reach, and finished it.
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 / 2009
www.hunkyspunky.com / 2010
www.hunkyspunky.com / 2008
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
FOLLOWING THE BEAT
When you don't
have a script,
follow the song.
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. It is the cleanest excuse to do editing exercises while pretending you're making art.
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.
DDFG · 2010
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.
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.
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.
We were not good musicians. The recordings live somewhere on a hard drive between "endearing" and "unlistenable", depending on the track. But the music videos taught me so much about editing to tempo, about how a cut can land on a beat, about how a small change in audio can completely change what a viewer feels in a shot. I cut every short film I make differently because of those years.
Animation & Special Effects
EFFECTS BAY ONLINE
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
[ 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 "bullet-time" shot where the camera-robot shoots a DV tape at the protagonist is a complete 3D recreation of the tape, animated in slow-mo past the camera. Looking back at it, I'm still genuinely proud of that one.
BREAKING XYZ News · iPrez
The XYZ News bit, again — three years on. By 2011 our skills were "professional" enough that I think we could've published this against The Onion 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.
GREENSCREEN ON AIR Also watch — XYZ News Special Report (2011)
Festivals · KSMS · Live TV
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 pile
Stop-motion stuffed animals
All 20+ at once
Attack scene
Run to the car
Hit-by-car effect, lifted from earlier
The penguin gets the last peck
Also watch — Austin Fender (2008) · our first festival submission
[ KSMS · THE VOICE OF SHAWNEE MISSION SOUTH ]
Inside the
control room.
KSMS was my high school's broadcast journalism program. We made the morning announcement show, news packages, sports features, comedy sketches — everything. Our teacher Mr. Hirons was supportive of every crazy idea we had, and we had a lot of them.
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
"Scott Hirons Experience"
A Flash game where you play as Mr. Hirons 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.
Cameras
2–3 of them
→
Analog switcher
push button to cut
→
Tape decks
poor man's instant replay
→
A/D → laptop
→ random streaming service
Custom intro animation
The booth
Instant replay
Sideline reporter
The tape decks were our "instant replay" rig. Each camera also fed a tape deck that recorded its input to a DV tape. 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.
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.
THE BLOCK PARTY · 7 PHOTOS
Block Party · live show #1
Block Party · live show #2
Block Party · live show #3
Block Party · live show #4
Block Party · live show #5
Block Party · live show #6
Block Party · live show #7
PROMO · "This is KSMS"
To promote Block Party I made a trick-shot commercial: a member of KSMS hits a basketball from an absurd distance. (Yes, the make is a VFX trick.) It got people talking.
FULL SHOW
TRAILER
PROMO
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.
One last film before college — Long Time No See (2011)
Kevin and I were headed to different colleges, so we made one 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.
Missouri State · Electronic Arts
MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY · 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.
A WHIRLWIND OF CLASS PROJECTS
MED 365 silent film · chase scene · complexity edit · ART 230 stop-motion · ART
300 disturbance · MED 465 One Up
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
- Strap four GoPros to a square toothpaste box on a light stand.
- Box happens to be the perfect dimensions for 90° horizontal FOV per camera.
- Start all four cameras. Clap loudly. Use the audio waveform to sync them all.
- Act it out. The character moves through the space; the audience can look anywhere.
- Export each angle to PNG sequences. Photoshop's batch panorama-stitch each frame.
- Build a custom WebGL viewer (three.js) where a video plays on the inside of a 3D sphere.
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · 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.
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.
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.
Fugue — my first 48-hour film (2014)
Before Split Life there was Fugue , 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's the film that taught me how much you can actually pull off in two days — and set up the swing I took the next year.
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.
PERSPECTIVE A · LEFT
PERSPECTIVE B · RIGHT
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.
Other films from these years:
One Up 2014
Cinematography-class short. Two guys try to one-up each other to land the same job. Real lighting setups, real coverage.
Nice to Meet You 2014
Senior-thesis warmup, shot in Canon RAW on a 5D mkIV with Magic Lantern firmware. The girl on the bench was on the phone the whole time.
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.
ONE UP — BTS
Bassless Ideas (2015) — a senior-year band
Kevin came to Missouri State for grad school my senior year (he finished Baylor a year early). We moved into a house and started writing music again. The result was a band called Bassless Ideas — two short EPs, a few ridiculous songs, a few serious ones. Still online, still occasionally listened to.
End of an era
CLOSING CREDITS · CHILDHOOD
Hunky Spunky's Oscars.
High school was wrapping up. Kevin was going to Baylor. I was going to Missouri State. We knew we'd see each other again — eventually — but Hunky Spunky Productions, the version with our childhood in it, was done.
So we sent it off the only way we knew how: The Spunksters — an awards show, modeled after the Oscars, for ourselves. Awards in every category. Speeches. Live-streamed. Projected on the side of a house. Forty friends in a 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 is so much more fun to take them seriously than to phone them in.
- +1 (913) ••• 4451this is HILARIOUS
- +1 (816) ••• 8210Why is Zordon a dog
- +1 (913) ••• 2199cried laughing at the PR3 trailer
- +1 (785) ••• 0772I love this so much
- +1 (816) ••• 5621Brian and Kevin forever ❤️
- +1 (913) ••• 9088Oscars 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 CHILDHOOD CHAPTER Off to college, in two different states.
Meanwhile No releases 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
CONCEPT ART · PRE-PRODUCTION
Telescan headquarters · concept art
Disposal room
The teleporter
Hi-tech restraints
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.
The minimalist cut
The villain one-sheet
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 is, to this day, the single longest project I've ever shipped.
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.
Brian Schwabauer
video · motion · interactive
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.
The pieces behind it
The individual work the reel was cut from — brand, motion graphics, logo animations, promos:
More, for the curious
- Net Price Calculator — a typography motion-graphics piece for the U.S. Department of Education's Net Price Calculator video contest. 1st place.
- Missouri Reverse Transfer — promo for a State of Missouri program that lets 4-year students retroactively earn their associates.
- Bioblitz 2014 — highlight video for a local environment-awareness event.
- DecisionFX — logo animation for a Kansas City data-collection company.
- URSA Experience — promo animation for MSU's first-year summer program.
- Engage Mobile — 5-year anniversary logo piece using one icon from every app they'd ever built.
- Humane Society — promo for the Southwest Missouri branch.
- ADPi Recruitment — sorority recruitment video at MSU.
- "Met You" by Tamish — official music video; I did the post, another videographer shot.
- 121 Live — Kickstarter video for a startup that wanted to share private live streams across the world.
- Wedding films — many. The Schwikes brand never took off. The work was great.
Wedding films
Many of them — most 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.
Sites I built and archived
A handful of small-business marketing sites I designed and built during this stretch. All of these still load — open them up.
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · Schwikes — the wedding business that didn't quite happen
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · Norton & Schmidt — engineering firm in KC
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · SoundRaiser — fundraising platform for music programs
Entrepreneurship
FROM FREELANCER → FOUNDER
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
[SA] Tower of the Americas — a kiosk companion app
The Tower of the Americas (in San Antonio) hired me to build an immersive companion app. 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.
FROM THE TOWER SHOOT · 8 PHOTOS
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.
2016–2017
Engagement Grower — a smarter "related posts" plugin
A WordPress plugin that picks suggested posts intelligently. It tracks impressions, clicks, and bounce rate on each suggestion, builds a model from that data, and serves the ones with the best signal. The plugin didn't break out commercially. The data pipeline was a good build.
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · Engagement Grower marketing site
2017–2018
Wyoti — partnered WordPress agency
Spun out of the Engagement Grower work — we partnered with Wyoti to build custom WordPress sites and plugins for clients. A solid bridge between freelance and product.
cdn.brianschwabauer.com ARCHIVED · Wyoti — agency site
2024
markable.page — a PDF planner builder for e-ink tablets
A planner builder that generates highly customizable PDFs with internal links, designed for devices like the reMarkable. Originally called "Remarkably Organized". Open-sourced. 200+ stars on GitHub. Built with Svelte.
2024+
SCRMBLD — 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. Made for fun, not for money.
S S
C C
R R
M M
B B
L L
D D
scrmbld.app · daily
Meanwhile Heads-down year: client work paying the bills while the idea that became Show&Tour kept getting sketched and re-sketched.
What I'm building now
CURRENT FOCUS · CO-FOUNDER
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.
This is my full-time job now. We have thousands of users. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built.
What it does, 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.
The dashboard
Where photographers run their business day to day.
Project list · dark mode
Project detail
Project · client view
Settings
Clients (empty state)
Projects (empty state)
Delivery page · dark
Built-in media player
Property websites & delivery pages
What the photographer's clients actually see.
963 N 1950 RD · client delivery
8700 Lee Boulevard · property site
Prairie Village Estate · property site
Brand · the rest
On a laptop
App icon
Marketing site
Business cards
Instagram ad
Brand guide cover
Side projects · for fun
FOR THE LOVE OF IT
Things I built
because I felt like it.
ghtui
A fast, minimal terminal UI for managing GitHub.
Triage your inbox without leaving the terminal. Open PRs, comment, review, merge — all keyboard-first.
github.com/brianschwabauer/ghtuiVIDEO TOOL
Video Curator
Intelligent curation for action-camera footage.
Processes huge volumes of footage automatically: drops pocket shots, surfaces high-quality clips and stills, and picks out moments where children are smiling or laughing. Mostly used to wrangle GoPro footage from family trips.
github.com/brianschwabauer/videocuratorTHE CREED
Everything on this page
comes down to three 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 three things I actually believe.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Do things that
don'tmatter.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.
That's the whole page. That's the whole plan. I live to create. I work to delight.
— Brian