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.
Before the startup, the apps, the company — there was a miniDV
camera, a bedroom wall painted green, and a friend named Kevin.
◄◄ Rewinding…
2026
20262006
2006The miniDV era
REC 00:00:01:14 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.
02.29.08
Leap-day shorts contest · 29 seconds
The local paper ran a 29-second short film contest for leap day. The
constraint forced us to learn quick cuts for the first time. We
placed 2nd. The technique stuck with us forever.
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.
№ 012006-08-10private
Quanesha
No script. No actors. Just two kids and a pile of stuffed animals.
№ 022006-08-30private
Bobby McQueen
A third friend joins. The plot? Mostly Turbana, a guy in a comically large turban.
№ 032006-10-21private
The Fight Scene
We tried to act in slow motion so we could "speed it up" later. It does not work.
№ 042006-12-22private
Super Swatter 3001
A class assignment "invention" — a 3-headed fly swatter — sold via fake infomercial.
№ 052007-01-05private
Noggin Saver
Kevin's invention: a device that stops chairs from tipping over.
№ 062007-09-09private
Ninja Men
A year later. Pre-cut apple + toothpick = a karate-chop split that holds up.
№ 072007-09-06private
Spatula Story
A quest. For a spatula. Don't ask.
№ 082008-02-23private
Rush for an Idea
Our first film with a real script. Greenscreen, a soundtrack, multiple takes.
№ 092008-02-29private
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.
2007 – 2008Early Technical Tests
Kevin's dad painted a wall 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.
CHROMA · 0x22FF90
XYZ News, Episode I
The funniest thing we'd ever made, by a country mile.
Floating anchor — turns out you need a tripodSame thumbs-up bug, different shotKevin as weatherman #1Greenscreen blanket → vanishing trickKevin, 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 COINHI · 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. Brian-faces. Pellets.
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 BriansLightsaber, the obligatory VFX riteHit-by-car testSame effect, in a real film a year laterAWC studio logo testTake One Films logoHunky 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 pitchChair, goneShoe, 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.
2007 – 2008Feature Length
PROJECT 02 · A FULL-LENGTH FILM, ALMOST
POWERRANGERS360
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
PINK
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
Morphin timeAmanda morphs (greenscreen graphic)Brian morphsEmma morphsKevin morphsRed vs Blue, the duelVino lands the "360"Reversed-footage summoningVino vanishesThe final duel beginsMorphin timeAmanda morphs (greenscreen graphic)Brian morphsEmma morphsKevin morphsRed vs Blue, the duelVino lands the "360"Reversed-footage summoningVino vanishesThe final duel begins
FROM POWER RANGERS 360 · 2007
ONE YEAR LATER 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 timeOn set, take whateverStunt prepYes, Zordon was played by a dogFlight comp, greenscreenMore set life
FROM THE FILM
The chargeBlades outRed vs henchmanFlight, greenscreenThrough the cloudsVino, back from "the dead"Profile shotLanding
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.
2009A 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.
2008 – 2010Music 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
01
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.
02
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.
03
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.
2009 – 2011Animation & 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
Building the city — timelapseSome 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.
SCROLL TO TRANSFORM
CAMERAMORPHROBOT
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.
Also watch — XYZ News Special Report (2011)
2009 – 2011Festivals · KSMS · Live TV
20+
awards won at film festivals in high school
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 setupThe pileStop-motion stuffed animalsAll 20+ at onceAttack sceneRun to the carHit-by-car effect, lifted from earlierThe 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.
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.
Block Party · live show #1Block Party · live show #2Block Party · live show #3Block Party · live show #4Block Party · live show #5Block Party · live show #6Block 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.
2011 – 2013End of an era
CLOSING CREDITS · CHILDHOOD
HunkySpunky'sOscars.
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.
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
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 CHAPTEROff to college, in two different states.
2011 – 2015Missouri 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.
Brian Schwabauer · just now
is feeling infatuated.
142 reactions · 38 comments
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.comARCHIVED · 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.
Split Life — a 48-hour film, in stereo (2015)
48-hour film festival. 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
2015 – 2019Freelancer · 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
brian@brianschwabauer.com
A slice of the portfolio
Brand work, motion graphics, logo animations, promos. A taste:
2015 demo reel · openMO Reverse Transfer · motion graphicsMO Reverse Transfer · logoDecisionFX · logo animationURSA · promoEngage Mobile · 5yr anniversaryHumane Society · logoADPi · recruitmentADPi · recruitment 2Holy Cross · t-shirt commercial
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
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.comARCHIVED · Schwikes — the wedding business that didn't quite happen
cdn.brianschwabauer.comARCHIVED · Norton & Schmidt — engineering firm in KC
cdn.brianschwabauer.comARCHIVED · SoundRaiser — fundraising platform for music programs
2015 – 2024Entrepreneurship
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.
Shooting the panorama on the observation deckDemoed on the tablet
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.comARCHIVED · 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.comARCHIVED · 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.
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.
SS
CC
RR
MM
BB
LL
DD
scrmbld.app · daily
2019 → todayWhat 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.
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 modeProject detailProject · client viewSettingsClients (empty state)Projects (empty state)Delivery page · darkBuilt-in media player
Property websites & delivery pages
What the photographer's clients actually see.
963 N 1950 RD · client delivery8700 Lee Boulevard · property sitePrairie Village Estate · property site
Brand · the rest
On a laptopApp iconMarketing siteBusiness cardsInstagram adBrand guide cover
2026 →Side projects · for fun
FOR THE LOVE OF IT
Things I built because I felt like it.
~/projects/ghtui — bash
ghtui
A fast, minimal terminal UI for managing GitHub.
Triage your inbox without leaving the terminal. Open PRs, comment, review, merge — all
keyboard-first.
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.
There's a separate, less professional version of all this.
schwabauer.family is where the
rest of my life lives. Wedding photos and films. Blog posts. Family photos. A short film I made for
fun called "Socially Distant Halloween". Photos of the treehouse I've been building in the backyard.
Our family cookbook (with the PDF you can download). The renovation of our house. The slow domestic
accretion that turns out to be most of life.
I started this page in 2006 with a stuffed-animal puppet show on a miniDV tape. I'm wrapping it up in
2026 with a property delivery platform that pays my bills. Somewhere in
between, every "useless" detour — Flash games, fake newscasts, lego stop-motion, Hall View, NODE, the
Pacman PowerPoint trick — became a piece of the next thing.
The loop hasn't changed. Pick a thing I've never done. Try it. Fail in public. Add it to the toolbag.
Use it later in something that matters more.
Show&Tour
