PERSPECTIVE A
The protagonist leaves her house. Later, she comes back.
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 now2026
3
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.
▌ 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, film it, and edit it. Then we'd do it again. Each project added a new tool to the toolbag, and each tool unlocked 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
Lightsaber, the obligatory VFX rite
Hit-by-car test
Hit-by-car test, in a real film a year later
Kevin as weatherman #1
Greenscreen blanket → vanishing trick
AWC studio logo test
Take One Films logo
Hunky Spunky Productions logo
Cleanplate rotoscope — chair, gone
Cleanplate rotoscope — shoe, gone
TWO TESTS THAT BECAME FILMS
Nuisance-B-Gone (2008)
Nuisance-B-Gone · 2008
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.
Sideline Huddler (2009)
Sideline Huddler · 2009
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: pick an effect we'd never done, dive in with no research and no tutorials, and learn by failing in public.
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
ONE YEAR LATER
WE TRIED IT AGAIN — BIGGER
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 it with some unnecessary scenes and a very long credits reel, but we made a 64-minute film we could be proud of.
FROM THE FILM
The charge
Blades out
Red vs henchman
Flight, greenscreen
Through the clouds
Vino, back from "the dead"
Profile shot
Landing
A Real Production Company
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.
None of it needed to exist. A plain page would have held the same films. But I wanted the site to look as good as I thought the films were, and that mattered to me before I could say why.
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 built it its own little Flash website. 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 would make things appear on a screen. It was magic. And I was hooked — I still am.
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 just ran in parallel, and on the film side I kept coming back to music videos, because you don't need a plot when you have a beat. We were not good musicians. But cutting to tempo taught me how a cut lands, and I still edit everything differently because of those years.
Flashlight · 2007
Our first original song. A guy goes slowly insane looking for a flashlight.
Flashlight (2007)
Do Da Flava G · 2010
We wrote a rap for a friend and got my whole family to dance in the video, grandparents included. It placed second at a local film festival.
Do Da Flava G (2010)
You Derive Me Crazy · 2010
Our AP Calculus project: a Britney Spears parody full of calc puns, with the whole class greenscreened into virtual sets.
You Derive Me Crazy (2010)
Animation & Special Effects
Anything I could imagine,
on screen.
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.
Calamity LEGO
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.
The army takes on the clay monster
Composited clouds for the flyover
The flyover from the cockpit
The same pass, from outside
An animated radar screen, drawn in After Effects
Mouths animated on, frame by frame
Explosions painted in behind the roto
The monster finally goes up
Behind the scenes — filming the city from a ladder
Behind the scenes — building the city, in timelapse
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.
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 robot runs Kevin down
Overexposed — it overheats and folds back into a camera
Scanning the house in 3D
Bullet-time — a DV tape modeled in 3D, fired in slow motion
The chase from the robot’s own POV
Behind the scenes — a camera strapped to an RC car for the POV shots
Behind the scenes — running backwards, filming the chase
Behind the scenes — no rain, so Wes dumped water on himself
XYZ News · iPrez
The XYZ News bit, again. 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.
Festivals · KSMS · Live TV
20 + awards won at film festivals · 2008–2011
Kevin and I submitted everything, everywhere, every year.
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.
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
[ 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
- Cameras 2–3 of them
- Switcher push a button to cut
- Tape decks one per camera
- A/D analog out, digital in
- Laptop to a streaming service
Program basketball vs SM-NW · 2011
KSMS live broadcast · basketball vs SM-NW (2011)
Custom intro animation
The booth
Instant replay
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)
Source
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)
- 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.
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.
Split Life — a 48-hour film, in stereo (2015)
SATO 48 is 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. I wanted to do something nobody had done before. So I made a film shot as two unbroken takes, shown side-by-side in real time.
PERSPECTIVE B
A man hidden outside breaks in while she's gone.
They turn out to know each other. It ends.
Split Life (2015) — 48-hour dual-perspective oner
THE CUE SHEET — HOW TWO ONERS STAYED IN SYNC
SYNC
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 — then recorded my own voice giving every cue at those exact timecodes:
"3, 2, 1, open the door"
…and blasted that audio through the house during filming, so every actor and operator knew exactly what should be happening at every moment.
SET
The actors had to be at exact locations at exact times — plus a handful of hidden cuts I knew I'd have to fix later.
POST
The hidden cuts fixed in VFX. The score written myself, late at night, on the deadline. Every trace of the cue audio replaced.
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.
Legacy 2015
A quiet 2-character short for my directing class that I wrote/directed/shot. A husband obsessed with his career, a wife who wants him home. At the time, I was really obsessed with what it means to leave a legacy and this was my attempt to explore that concept.
Legacy (2015)
ON SET · 2012–2015
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — silent film
MED 365 — chase scene
Facebook in Real Life — everyone "likes" a post
MED 365 — Complexity
Premier Studios internship — the interns
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 — flash mob shoot
First place at the Live Life Green festival
ART 230 final — stop motion
Filming the dorm talent show
Ditch the Pitch
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set
Katie Bauer's Breakup — on set
End of an era
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. It was hilarious sitting a few feet away from a live video feed of speeches projected to the size of a house (in the same backyard where the Power Rangers premieres had played).
A SMALL, RIDICULOUS THING
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. It was 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 for ~40 people are silly — some might say pointless. But there's something special about taking "fun" seriously. Put in the effort — even for the things that don't matter.
- +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) ••• 5621Hunky Spunky Productions forever ❤️
- +1 (913) ••• 9088Oscars who?
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. And that's okay.
It wasn't the end of us, though. Kevin finished Baylor a year early and came to Missouri State for grad school, so we were roommates my senior year. I was making too many films for class and for clients to make one with him. We made music instead, as a band called Bassless Ideas. It is exactly as serious as it sounds.
Today he's in Texas with his wife and three kids, and I'm in Kansas City with mine. We email, and we get together whenever one of us is in town.
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 forced to use a new teleporter in an emergency. The machine scans you, prints a copy at the other end, and destroys the original, which the public doesn't know. The power flickers mid-scan, and now there are two of her.
The question the film explores: if a perfect 1:1 copy of you exists, is the copy 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
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.
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
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
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
The one I was standing in.
I shot plenty of wedding films for other couples. 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.
A smile caught between takes
The reception, once the dancing starts
Maggie & Brian, 2013 · a frame from their film
On set · working around the group photo
On set · a wedding in a very large church
When we were dating, we'd stay up talking until 4am, even with class at 8 the next morning. We still talk like that. She's funny, she's honest, and she doesn't just listen, she hears you. She also has the most beautiful blue eyes I've ever seen.
The wedding was one of the best days of my life. We gave out pancake mix as party favors, because making pancakes together on Sunday was our tradition. Nobody wanted to leave, and the venue finally had to kick us out. What I remember most is the gratitude, standing in a room full of people who wanted the best for us.
We honeymooned at Disney World and Universal Studios, because we are not sit-on-the-beach people. Then we moved to Texas and started our life.
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.
Jordan and I were living in Texas by then. She was a residence director at Texas State, I was building my first products, and in the summer we floated the Guadalupe River.
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
The best way to deliver real estate media.
I met Josh at a wedding. We were seated at the same dinner table, and he started telling me about his real estate photography business and the software he wished existed to run it. At the time, I was building software for freelance videographers.
Then it clicked: we should build something together. After a month of excitedly sketching on napkins, we got to work. Nine months later, we launched.
That was 2019. Show&Tour is now a project delivery platform for real estate photographers: property websites, branded delivery pages, invoicing, and a workflow built around how photographers work.
We weren't first. Other companies were already selling to real estate photographers. But Josh knew what they got wrong, because he was the customer, and I knew how to build it. Neither of us could have made it alone.
Brand
On a laptop
App icon
Marketing site
Business cards
Instagram ad
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.
About a year after we launched, a photographer sent us a video nobody had asked for. It was just them, talking to the camera about how much they loved the software and where it was headed. Software users are usually faceless. This one had a face, and I could see the delight on it. It's the closest I've come, building software, to being a kid in a backyard watching someone watch my film. That feeling still fuels me.
delightstack
A full-stack toolkit for building delightful apps on Cloudflare.
Every opinion I've formed about how software should feel, extracted into code. It runs under this site and everything I start now.
…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.
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.
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.
4 shots
delightviewer
A quick-look media viewer for Linux.
Opens basically anything — photos and RAW files, video, PDFs, fonts, 3D models — in a native Wayland window that is up before you notice it. Annotate, crop, grade and trim without ever touching the original, and export a new version when you like the result. The Carousel gesture system from delightstack, ported to native. Written in Rust, GPL-3.
When I'm not shipping, I'm in Kansas City with Jordan and our four kids. The first was born in 2020, in the middle of covid, and another has shown up about every year and a half since. It's exhausting in the best way.
Once a week we have Daddy School. I pick something I think they should know and we spend the afternoon on it: how to introduce yourself, how to use power tools, how to change a tire, who the Wright brothers were. Right now the subject is filmmaking. We're making a short film and the kids are doing most of the work. They're getting an earlier start than I did, and a much better camera.
The rest of the time I'm building them a treehouse, camping, running, or halfway through a renovation. I play guitar and write songs. I 3D-print things we could've just bought. The treehouse is the bedroom green screen all over again: nobody needs it, and I'm learning as I go.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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%
Next project
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.
FIN
Brian Schwabauer will return
in: whatever gets built next.