The History Of SHOWSOTROS

[This page was created and posted in honor of the seven-year anniversary of SHOWSOTROS! Productions on November 21, 2015.]

Best way to understand how an entity got to where they're at is to understand their history. Having underwent a brief label-identity crisis, SHOWSOTROS! didn't come into fruition until an original series went into production in 2008, then aired in 2009.

Originally dubbed as "Kris Caballero Productions," a name burned in on the Flashback to 2004-2005 montage video, the production name wasn't considered until much later. Undergoing a content spiral, the release of "New Dark Ages" sported RT2V—Round Table Television Productions. Due to the common usage of the words "Round Table," it was immediately changed to Round-The-Table Television Productions keeping the acronym already. (The concept of "round table" was inspired from the powerful summon Knights of Round from the classic game Final Fantasy VII, becoming one with my personal last name which is Spanish for "knight.")

Growing tired of the lip-syncing bore-fest was the launch of a brand new series released in 2009. Previously titled "The Nosotros Show," a call for a more unique title had to be used. Combining the words "nosotros" and "show" came "The Showsotros" approved for the title of this series. Because the name was catchy and punchy, I found myself tagging the word next to "Productions," and thus the name was born. The short-lived series eventually was changed to Today's Guest.

Logo designs for SHOWSOTROS! was the most difficult thing I had to endure through. Judging by all this, archived and posted for your pleasure, you can see why. I have ran down the reasons/meanings behind such designs and why it was approved for usage:

Late 2008
Simple. Plain and simple. (What I should've done was make the rose in the center pop up along with the text.)
Late 2008
Having mentioned the commonality of "Round Table," I went on to change it into this. This title was also used as a title page for all my videos on the website. Eventually, I simply used "Filmography."
Late 2008
Abbreviating the production name, let alone using this unbelievable graphic as my website logo at one time (made in homage to Adobe's slick CS3-style icons), I knew this wasn't going to do.
Late 2008
"Home to all the cool knights and hot princesses," it reads. Mixing thoughts in producing projects along with college work doesn't meld well.
Late 2008
And so it began: the very first launch and design of SHOWSOTROS! which derives from the logo used on the Today's Guest series. The color choice, of course, was inspired from the colors of the US flag (except the dark gray).
Late 2008 (UNRELEASED)
Instead of using the word "Production," I gave "Nosotros Network" a try. Back during this day, bringing about an "online network," similar to a "TV network," seem to have been a crazy idea. Gosh was I wrong....
Early 2009
That almost-circular design was *proudly* inspired by the 1994-1995 version of Family Feud. Very cool, eh?
Early 2009
Not sure why I was really into the Family Feud '94 design but I just really liked it. Perhaps TV/web shows out there ought to show off this cool design.
Early 2009
Didn't have a kick for gambling that time yet, so I forgotten why I even used the card suits on the logo in the first place.
Mid 2009
Restarting our official website from scratch, I unknowingly integrated the word "Enterprise," supposedly trying to cover other areas of interest besides videomaking (computer programming and photography, apparently). Covering the entire franchise, including our other website The Seeds of Books, it is now under the KC Universal umbrella. (Very much in the same way Larry Page did for Google, having created Alphabet.)
Mid 2009
Remade from the unreleased design made back in late 2008. Kicking off the new production name mashing up things that describe and cover our topics and references for comedy, even reusing the Round-The-Table shield. Yeah, well....
Late 2009 (UNRELEASED)
Very much the same concept from the original logo made back in 2008. This one, however, features a bolded text and a space-laden background.
Early 2010
Hah! I snatched the idea of this design from the amazing "h-bar"—a constant denoted by physicist Max Planck. Only used once.
Early 2010
Alright, so here: my sports fanaticism kicked in, namely NBA basketball, around this time, and having inspired by the Lakers' text style, it was mixed in with the colors of former NBA team Charlotte Bobcats. Instead of a fierce head of a bobcat, it's the letter S in a comet-esque illustration.
Mid 2010
Sticking with the circular design and....using a mathematical symbol to represent my productions. That math symbol is the "Contour Integral" found and used in Calculus and Analysis.
Mid 2011
Used as a profile icon for our YouTube channel. 'Twas a bit less messy but nothing too much behind the making of this design.
Mid 2011
Trying to use Nintendo's font, this design was too bland to even market with.
Mid 2011
Sporting a retro 8-bit font, this design wasn't used for very long.
Mid 2011
If you know me, I'm a big TV game show geek myself. The colors here was derived from the snazzy design from The Price Is Right back in the early seventies to eighties. Here's a video example to show you what I'm talking about.
Mid 2011
I don't know. I really don't know....
Late 2011
Carrying on with the planetary design, this turned out better but it was way too cheesy.
Early 2012
Researching in trying to integrate something graphically high for our new series Handheld Niño, I learned about a 3D motion graphics plug-in and thought it was the perfect opportunity to remake the logo.
Mid 2012
Removing the stage light but keeping the near-3D design of the text, I placed the logo in front of a lens flare. Up until this time, I felt this looked cleaner, neater and simple.
Early 2014
Sticking with the logo design previous to this one, and having gone through the roughest and most emotional moment in my personal life, I spontaneously felt it was time to change the logo. Moving away from a 3D look, this was a 2D design with a stimulation of a gloss—a style that was rendered "cool" back in 2009-2010, in a silly attempt to make a comeback for this style. Also decided to stylize the second letter S in negative space.

Over the years, getting something started and launched is the difficult part because you have to come up with a mark before using that stake to go ahead and draw everything else up; From then on, you can continue from there and can always make some changes and improvements if need be. Besides the official logo, I learned all of what I said through the building of the website itself.

Building while maintaining a website isn't easy (perhaps I should say "wasn't"). With today's site features and web hosting companies, they try to make it easy to build one for the average consumer. However, for the more advanced users and admins, getting your hands dirty is the only way—web programming. Having been exposed to, and self-taught in various web programming languages out there from PHP to Ruby [on Rails], toying with awesome text editors like vi/pico/emacs, my brain was dipped in web programming trying to figure it all out (this was back in 2009).

Even though I wanted to start a fan website for the classic TV sitcom Three's Company back in 1999-2000 through a Windows website-building software called Trellix Site Builder, my first exposure to web-building dates back to late 2005, launching a personal blog-like page through the company website Tripod, to which I've maintained up until around 2008. Trying to revive it, I closed it officially in 2009-2010. In addition to that tenure, I maintained a fan-based website dedicated to the popular Philippine TV variety show WOWOWEE, originally launched in 2006, but didn't have an official domain name until near-2007. Being the only fan website in its existence, it received over 20,000 unique visitors in very little time. Learning the ups and downs of website maintenance, along with jealous/snotty emails from fans who were too lazy to come up with something better of their own, including emails from perverts asking me for phone numbers for the female dancers of the show, it was a fun experience.

After closing down the WOWOWEE fan website around 2009, came the launch of SHOWSOTROS! in 2008. Experimenting with different layout styles, finding out better ways in presenting the content took years to come through.

Oh, my learning of HTML? It actually came from the ever popular, yet nostalgic, MySpace. Without it, the programming journey would've taken much longer, with a brief exception of Facebook (that was before they began to change the Notes editing feature to a WYSIWYG editor, instead of the required use of HTML markup coding). I truly believe social media ought to bring back that required usage of markup languages and/or programming languages to achieve a desired look/style for the client. (Then again, this may be a security issue waiting to bust that crack open.)

Looking at these old screenshots, you can tell. Here are what I have found in our archives thus far (will be updated if more are found periodically all throughout):


Early 2008
Used a black background to ease the viewers' eyes. Along with the main features, links and biographies, yes, I added a "Super Nosotros Lottery" on the front page. I think I was too excited going overboard with the official launch. The numbers served no purpose as we never hosted an actual lottery (though it sounds like a good idea).

Early 2010
Aiming a more "dynamic" redesign, this layout didn't have much room for what I was looking to do and add.

If you also notice, our slogan used to be "It's That Special Kind of Entertaining." That slogan was derived from a lyric in one of Tears For Fears' rare songs titled "Queen Of Compromise."

Early 2010
I actually liked this design, featuring a filmstrip menu. However, it was styled using frames, and regardless of what web browser you use, could cause some viewing issues. Still was proud of this though.

Late 2011
During December 2010, I hit a roadblock. This video was submitted as an entry to a film festival, and while it wasn't the greatest video ever made, it was shot down horridly having lost to two editors with zero editing experience (one comedy crew, who spent nearly a thousand dollars renting camera equipment to shoot their comedy film short which involved being roommates with an alien, were livid and angry at losing to those very same editors). I never expected to win and I admired my professor for her excellent teaching, but after this result, I took the loss so hard and personal that I wanted to quit video production and find another area of interest, which, at that time, would have been Computer Science and/or Mathematics. (Yes, video is as subjective as music, so it can't fulfill everyone's entertainment dinner. All this felt like raw/upcoming editing talent aren't worthy of anything because of....anything. Reasons like this is why YouTube exists and will forever live. Perhaps YouTube should never to be taken for granted; It's a world where every great talent is welcome for watching.)

After a little talk with close friends along with keen advice, I jumped back to where I was later in 2011. And while the layout here was rather dry, it simply because I was barely—barely—making a comeback. Slowly but surely. Nevertheless, that was a tough moment.

Early 2013
This was a layout still under development. There were more I wanted to squeeze in but couldn't figure out a way that time.

Early 2013
Not bad, not bad. However, this layout doesn't line up properly sometimes but it worked during its usage. This was the very same website layout where I first interviewed the star of the children's series Mother Goose was Mother Goose herself, Cheryl Rhoads!

Over our tenure, a lot has happened in the development of SHOWSOTROS! as a whole. In fact, as of this writing in 2015, it was near the end of summer that SHOWSOTROS! went on to expand to other areas of interest under the following: VIDEOGAMESOTROS! which is covering and talking about video games; HANDHELDGAMESOTROS! which discusses everything handheld and portable video gaming; COMPUTERGAMESOTROS! which covers and talks everything computer games; COMICBOOKSOTROS! which provides overviews of various comic books; FOODSOTROS! a haven for food reviews, cooking TV shows and original recipes; SPICESOTROS! reviewing various spices of everything kinds; MATHSOTROS! which provides Math History and some cool math tutorials; SPORTSSOTROS! which talks about all sports, namely the professional sports world; ASTROSOTROS! talking and informing about the gorgeous subject of Astronomy; GAMINGSOTROS! which talks about everything gambling.

MATHSOTROS!, SPORTSSOTROS!, ASTROSOTROS! and GAMINGSOTROS! are still in the works. (Hey, it's a one-man crew here. Everything you see written, maintained, updated, posted and created are all entirely by me.) In addition to my fascination with school subjects, such as Math and Astronomy, I had to bump them in along with entertaining. The inspiration? Books. Nothing cushions my eardrums than the sounds of cracking a book open; Reading is partying for me. While the world is in chaos, people honking at other bad drivers, bars/clubs being closed down because of drunken brawls over soccer games, peace does exist in this world: books. That's it, and that's where I went all out to provide its own domain filled with book reviews and some poems: The Seeds of Books. (The name "The Seeds of Books" was derived from Tears For Fears' third album The Seeds of Love coming from their hit song "Sowing The Seeds of Love.")

Lastly, KC Universal is a label I founded in early 2015. Simply, it was made as an "umbrella" making SHOWSOTROS! and The Seeds of Books conglomerates under this label.

That very much covers the whole history of SHOWSOTROS! and its growth. As mentioned earlier, getting started is the tough part and sticking to something that clicks enough to satisfy the looks and needs of your goals is rigidly tough, but certainly not impossible. SHOWSOTROS! has a whole lot more to offer and only continues to blossom. The work and expansion behind all this may be too ambitious for a one-man production but certainly, it has gone through so much. Besides, if you want to do it, you might as well do it.

[This page was created and posted in honor of the seven-year anniversary of SHOWSOTROS! Productions on November 21, 2015.]