Category: Video Production

Halloween Etsy sale active!

In acknowledgement of the fact that the October Halloween sale is going on, and that all Etsy items are temporarily 30+% off, I’ve updated the sale info page of this site accordingly:

Astonishing Etsy Bargains! (hornbostelproductions.com)

It seems to be a big deal somehow – 90 people, sometimes over a hundred, are showing up each day now that the sale’s begun. And yes, this sale event encompasses my birthday. I’m turning 37 this October. I’m getting old.

If you want this to be a good birthday for me, or a good Christmas for my family, or you just want to make me able to donate more to *actual* worthy causes, want to help with my launching of more completed projects (videos, video games, stock media packs, new print products, papercraft sets, whatever it is I’m doing or working on that’s going to make backing the shop worthwhile in your eyes, well, you can get some AWESOME discounts right now on a wide range of things you’ll love to have, while also helping me to further goals I care about and that will assist my family, friends, and the world.

MatthewLHornbostel – Etsy

Thanks so much, everyone!

Here are some greeting cards that are one of the many things on sale that’ve taken off suddenly like crazy despite the fact that I only released them very recently. These big, glossy greeting cards are currently a dollar each:

One dollar per card! Less for a three-pack! And I’ll include an envelope with any future cards in the mailer, a big one that can hold what is admittedly a larger than typical Christmas card.
Just released, nobody’s bought one yet, but these 6″ by 9″ sticker name tags (for trick or treaters) are on sale under $1 each. They can have whatever name[s] and text color you want, so easy stuff for tacking onto a candy container for people on the street to identify the name of your little ghost/goblin if that’s useful.
It astonishes me just how rapidly this listing took off. There are a dozen people with custom bookmarks in cart at the moment, on my Etsy shop. But not too hard to understand why. A lot of people want custom bookmarks and either have their own designs or want one put together. And at under $1 for a bookmark plus shipping, the current sale pricing on this listing is really hard to ignore. The prices even drop steadily from there as the number of copies rises, currently going under $0.40 per bookmark (!) with sufficient volume, during the sale.
Also, there’s a super-colorful preset batch of bookmarks, with my own archive of art paintings printed differently on front and back of eight. No customization but it’s under $1.50 during this sale – for a set of EIGHT of these art bookmarks.

The four above examples? They’re just a few of the 50+ active listings. Seriously, go look at the shop right now, it’s crazy how good the pricing is on everything for the rest of October 2023.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

A recently posted new painting. Acrylic on canvas. Mojave desert imaginary scene. On sale, 45% off. $15 + shipping.
The best ‘promotional boost’ package there, is now on sale at just $45. That bundle includes a shipment of 250 double-sided business cards with your design or a custom one built in Photoshop based on your input, hundreds of custom flyers, plus an online promotion to 75,000+ people via search and banner ads, from someone who actually has some experience in making that stuff work in finding people. I mean, you ran across my site, didn’t you? 😉

The stock media stuff has struggled out of the gate – there’s a scathing review of the video VFX pack which ultimately has been pulled off the shop to be redone completely at some point. The textures have some (far fewer, but some) issues as a collection too, but a HUGE update’s due to the collection within the next 20 days. An update that’s been in the works seemingly forever but… it involves over a hundred more materials and scattered enhancements to the first thousand textures in the collection which bring those up fully to modern standards. As PBR surfaces, they’ll just look better, which has to do with a ton of careful manual editing I’m doing, and some clever cutting-edge AI processes for upscaling and depth solving. As for the video (VFX) collection and that – the only negative review I have on my Etsy account out of 180+ total reviews… yeah, it’s true, many of those clips are pretty much unusable these days. Standard-def footage is useless to many video editors and is, as stated, blurry. Set aside the several ‘shaky’ clips that are not easily usable for that reason and the main issue is resolution/blurriness of the bulk of the material. You all, I spent a few hundred $ shooting all that stuff but much of it is years old. Like, in some cases, as old as 2011-2013. So yeah, the budget-range cameras of that era were not good enough to grab footage useful by modern standards. It’s why much of that stuff’s gone freeware at this point on https://matthornb.itch.io [the TACC2018 page] and I hope you don’t hold that older video material against me.

That said: I am working towards some modern 3d rendered physics-sim elements in 4k so hopefully when that is out it’ll make up for the flaws of the old stuff. Well, that and the texture and 3d asset pack updates inbound.

And I’m still working on a HornbostelVideos website update and it’s been slow in coming but I think I’ve got the design right this time. It’s a very tricky thing, setting up a video site that needs to not only hold close to a hundred videos with room to grow from there, but in a way that is intuitive to navigate AND has to be responsive, i.e it must read clearly even on a cheap phone screen that’s as little as 300-400 pixels wide. I’ve currently got the new design set up to look good on low res screens, medium res, and high res full-HD. I won’t advise you to watch on your phone, I’d prefer a good tablet or iPad or a desktop/laptop but people do watch stuff on phones and I have to be able to handle that!

News on numerous fronts will be posted here between now and the end of 2023. Keep an eye out for cool stuff. That’s all for now I guess.

Web Network overhaul [late July 2022]

I used to *still* be renewing some of my domains through HostGator still (because those jerks won’t let me transfer them, and now their system’s so broken that the ability to renew the domains no longer exists in any functional form.)

So the reality here is that many of my domain names will be expiring over the next few months.

New (replacement) domain names will be announced here later but for now I’m keeping the new names quiet until they’re successfully registered. Keep in mind though that some of the core domains remain, including HornbostelProductions.com, HornbostelVideos.com, and TriumphantArtists.com. Those three I can guarantee will not change.

As far as the web network in general, I intend to redesign pretty much every single site in it over the next month. I’m already starting that process with what will be the replacement for RedeemerDocumentary.com, RedeemerChurch3d.com [domain acquired, site not all there yet]. This site will now be focused less on any history I had with that or other churches, and more on the 3d reconstruction project related to the church structure.

HornbostelVideos.com will be reworked with WordPress and will look a lot more YouTube-y with a far more modular layout that will make it simpler for me to integrate new video content there periodically over time.

Many of my domains will soon face other changes as well – more consistent and faster-loading banner ad code for example, integrated into [nearly] every page of the network with only a few exceptions. I’m well aware that despite all odds, some of my sites, this one included, are in the top 2 million most visited on the entire internet, according to the likes of Alexa, and should [in theory] be generating a few dollars/day per site, just by existing, and having a few ad slots on them. And as much as I dislike that, I’ll be going along with it, though I will try to minimize the disruptiveness of such ads. No pop-ups or pop-unders, just an embedded banner here and there. If this succeeds to any reasonable extent, it might be key to making the likes of HornbostelVideos.com viable. I have a plan in place for releasing almost my entire past video library there, and that plan should finally be live later this month [here’s hoping, anyway]

Other key updates? Etsy has stabilized nicely, and the shop there continues to gain ground with over 80 positive reviews, and I’ll be posting a few new paintings and other things there soon even though it’s obvious that the affordable printing services are mostly what is successful there. Itch.IO is starting to boom but the July 4th promo did not have the viral impact I hoped it would – I had $25 worth of gift cards ready to hand out and… people didn’t do what was needed to claim them. All the same, the core campaign did draw a few hundred people to the shop and resulted in a small number of sales. So hopefully, things will continue to grow there, and I do have three ratings/reviews there now so the shop is developing a positive reputation finally instead of the ‘no reputation at all’ it had for years. I’m still trying to get a list of things out there by end of summer, including two new VFX packs and a texture collection, more 3d assets, maybe even a game or two if things go smoothly enough.

My sister Katie is running a Kickstarter and I edited the video promoting it for her. You can check that out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/debutworshipalbum/debut-worship-album-and-music-video

Etsy & Itch.IO sales, August 2021

I had mentioned in my last post that I was aiming to get three new collections posted on Itch.IO shop by Labor Day, plus a launch of ‘Panoramic Worlds HD’. These collections include a 3d-asset sci-fi and a medieval/fantasy collection BUT also a big VFX elements pack.

That VFX elements pack, I have a few possible outcomes for. The lowest-end outcome would involve a ackage of 20-odd digital effects – rigid-body dynamics debris blasts/falls and a mix of explosion FX that are simulated. But if you want an additional 25+ clips of real stuff in the mix, from dirt bursts to debris and splashes and cloud tank stuff potentially, well, I have a contingency plan for that but it’ll cost me about another $150 to do it right, $150 I currently do not have in place.

That $150 is almost entirely a mix of additional debris materials, the aforementioned water tank setup, a waterproof case, and camera lenses. I’ve already got a viable camera that can do this stuff at high quality 120fps – though if you really want pristine footage and the amount raised is close to $300, I can trade out my camera system and push that to be a bit better as well. Though, I’m unsure if that’ll happen.

The catch: The budget is locked in by Aug. 16 – so any funding raised after that will not be in time to meaningfully change the scope of the asset pack. That pack is launched by Sept. 1 so… any materials that I order in the last 2 weeks before package launch are going to be a bit too late.

SO HERE’S MY OFFER FOR AUG. 10-15:

-WHILE THERE’S NO NEW ITCH.IO SALE FROM ME SO CLOSE TO LABOR DAY, recall [firstly] that Ko-fi payments sent to me do include all existing asset packs I’ve got on Itch.IO plus any future Itch.IO packages. And for now, those Ko-fi payment minimums are very low. As in, $2.25 to buy ALL MY STOCK MEDIA PLUS ALL STOCK-MEDIA and ITCH.IO GAME FUTURE UPDATES.

https://ko-fi.com/s/77537ed3e4 – click here to take advantage of the new $2.25 Ko-fi deal directly.

–Second, everything on Etsy is about to go on sale and not always discounted to the same extent. The digital products on Etsy are going to hit 45% off from Aug. 10-15, 2021. That’s mainly some print-your-own miniature papercraft kits in a mix of scales. But if you opt to order anything physical on Etsy it’ll be 25% off [and] will include a free download link to all the content I have on Itch.IO. As in, that same $2.25 deal is included with all Etsy physical-item orders for a span of the next six days!

And remember, the Etsy link is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

The big Etsy promo pic.


One of my smaller, newer paintings.

February 2020, updates

Some of you may have noticed a problem with my eBay shop lately. Things are taking longer to deliver. Orders do, in some cases, take weeks to fulfill.

That has much to do with my bare-bones financial condition. I’ve made a lot of artworks and am shipping them as soon as I can, but even so the delays continue to escalate as some customers have requested and been given, refunds. Note that even in these cases I still will fulfill their orders, it’s kind of important to me even if it makes zero difference to eBay, but… the last two weeks I’ve been scraping through huge piles of sub-minimum wage tasks in an aim to finish shipping all delayed orders. My losses [all factors considered] on eBay in the past 40 days are in excess of $70 which makes me a rather godawful excuse for a business person but maybe not a truly horrendous ‘person’ person?

I’ve been doing a ton of stuff on mTurk and other places, every gig I can grab, at $2-3 per hour, including low-end tasks I’d normally not touch, in an effort to stabilize things and resolve complaints from customers, complaints that have piled up badly.

You need to know that I’m working on it, working very hard to shovel my way out of the broken mess I’m now stuck in. Much of that low wage work’s already done, I do see some delays/lag as likely though as the tasks are still being approved and shifted out to a usable form of money. But I’ve earned $10+ daily doing that and it seems to be piling up faster than the refunds are going out. So sending refunds *and* shipping all of the ordered items, should be viable in the next week at most.

Upsides: my Itch.IO profile has seen a gradual climb in sales even despite total absence of reviews from buyers there. Even comments here and there would be enormously impactful FYI, the only feedback I have ever gotten was a comment on one Itch stock-media pack that said the collection was a great deal. Which explains why that one pack is accounting for about 60% of all my sales on Itch!

Also, I’ve made a second sale on Etsy, so it seems that is going well and I’m posting three new artworks soon, later than I’d aimed to, but still… they will be posted.

Here’s the item that was sold. I’m still posting more and more art there as time passes. I expect the total number of available listed items to be around 25 by the end of February:

Likewise, I’m nearly done setting up an overhauled version of TriumphantArtists.com and will switch everything over to the new web design in another day or so. It’s better in terms of navigation, clean style, and flexible [responsive] formatting. The pages, in general, load faster too!

As usual though, don’t expect the changes to necessarily show up in your browser without hitting refresh. My advice, go to the main page at TriumphantArtists.com next week, hit refresh, and, err, feel refreshed I guess by how the site looks after that point? I expect the switch over will be in effect by Feb. 15 and may become visible worldwide over the following 48 hrs. so some cool things should result from that.

“Pirate video” – I’m making a little video short for the nephews’ birthday, putting an hour or so a day into that on top of everything else. It includes some pretty awesome VFX shots. That’s just another reminder of what I can do with videos and visual effects!

sea battle – pirates in pittsburgh suburbs. .GIF loop.

Ships sailing in a pond, during a storm.

Final note – I know everybody’s so, so tired of waiting for something to happen with Miniature Multiverse. I have completed the first part of the game’s design, 100%, with other sections of the game in varying stages of completion. Now I’ve opted to release a ‘partial version’ with the later areas all stripped out temporarily, and post that as a downloadable on Itch.IO with added sections posted every two months afterwards as long as it is still selling (if it sells much at all really, which given the nature of indie game dev, is unclear.) So that is the first fifth of the game which will be posted on Feb. 24th, along with the corresponding sections of the making-of PDF for ‘Extras’ buyers. So yeah, a lot is going on right now. I’m working every waking hour on something creative or earnings related [or both] lately and wouldn’t have things be any other way.

Happy Holidays (2019)!

Hello everyone, hope you’re having a good time as 2019 nears its end.

I’ve got a few key updates for all of you.

Etsy update – My often dormant Etsy shop actually has some listings available again. One of them has already sold!

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Better: All prices are 25% off during the Black Friday/Thanksgiving/Cyber Monday span. So if you want an item… now is a good time for 25% off.

Remember my Etsy shop? It’s active again. Here’s a pumpkin pie painting I made.

Happy holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, New Year’s, etc.

Pinteresting… As a result of posting a ton of freshly revealed .GIF clips from my video productions and other projects, I’ve had a staggering 800+% spike in Pinterest views from October to November, which I suspect drives some of the activity I’m seeing elsewhere [the above Etsy sale, for example].

Check my Pinterest boards to see why that’s taking off like crazy:

Pinterest – Matthew Hornbostel’s profile

And also active [through Cyber Monday is a jaw-dropping 81% off sale on all of my Itch.IO stuff [asset packs with 3d models, stock video FX elements, and texture maps] bundled together. Five asset packs (AND) an early Miniature Multiverse preorder, for $1.69.  Here’s a direct link to the bundle page:

Holiday Bundle – Cyber Monday sale!

There are some new GIFs, video clips, and stills scattered across my ITch.IO pages to showcase the evolving status of my asset packs. I pushed a big update recently to some of them and will be posting some smaller incremental updates very soon – fixes to a few texture-file links and a couple of other small but noticeable glitchy details [like the dandelion texture which I noticed issues with] and I’ll also be adding the long-awaited hanging spanish moss to the ‘Marshes & Meadows’ pack. So those fixes will be posted soon. I tried to participate in the Icehouse Game Jam but fell behind my intended schedule and opted not to submit a very incomplete minigame. However, I’ll still finish the mystery game production [teased on Twitter & Pinterest] at some point.

A new plan… I am working on overhauling HornbostelVideos.com and TriumphantArtists.com. 

There will be a lot of new  stuff for everyone, massive improvements in content and responsiveness for various devices and the new drop-down navigation is way nicer, plus my video-player setup is way cooler, with a wide range of professional-ish features. Plus it’s all way cleaner looking and no giant endless blocks of text. And long awaited comics and a few more articles actually posted which are not currently available.

HOWEVER, VIDEO IS STILL A LEGAL MESS:

There is a tangled mass of challenges in terms of dealing with video content I have made over the years. I’d love to hit the ground running VERY FAST the day this large-scale new overhaul goes live in mid January of 2020. I need to convince the assorted family and friends to accept terms I’ve laid out [quickly] but that’ll require them to believe signing on [ie allowing their roles to be public and facing possible embarrassment] will somehow be worth it. I have a way to do this but it’s a bit tricky in a few ways, and I will NOT guarantee the online survival of the site video content beyond its first year. I do think I could pull off the plan [but] it’s contingent on this stuff finding an audience.

TV networks need subscribers or millions of live viewers bombarded with commercials, and I will not intrude on my stuff with video ads stalling the video content, nor will I require a subscription or paywall. There will be a still, not animated, banner ad at bottom of each page below the video stuff, and a widget for social media sharing, and that is *it*. So I expect far less revenue per viewer, as a result, than ‘TV’ because I refuse to be intrusive and wish to respect my audience.

Resulting harsh truth: I’ll launch with about 25-30 videos in the site library, and each of them needs to, on average, hit nearly 7,000 unique, REAL views/month. Minimum. That is, 2 million total [combined] video views in the first year. I have had family express skepticism that my VFX-laden, comedy and/or action videos will be of any interest to the broader world.

Well… Pinterest is a fascinating case study. The REASON my Pinterest views have exploded to 800-900/day has mostly to do with about a dozen amusing .GIFs from my video projects. Some of those have been seen by *thousands* of Pinterest viewers. So I figure, if a 5-10 second GIF loop from me grabs a thousand viewers in the past week… how well might the actual high-res video do? I truly believe what my family finds fun the world will too. So that’s why I’m emboldened to give this a shot.

THE SCHEDULE:

Currently, the Cyber Monday sales are active –  and some Etsy art is viewable and some Itch.IO asset packs updated, but little else is new.

Lots of gamedev, video, and web design stuff is going on in the background during December, though.

Jan. 20th, 2020 – the web network updates go live including way more video content, new design, comics, articles… etc.

Feb. 15, 2020 – the Miniature Multiverse extras pack and a bunch of new preview material gets posted online, generating further buzz.

March 15th, 2020 – the full game (Miniature Multiverse) hits Itch.IO and Steam.

Shortly after that I will be reevaluating my plans based on how successful or not, that game’s been. If it goes well, more will happen faster. We’ll see.

 

 

September 2019 updates

 

So… the things I said I intended to do, in my last post, are happening.

-eBay stock media DVDs, are being sold and some are being auctioned right now along with a lot of other amazing deals intended to draw attention to the store I have there.

https://www.ebay.com/usr/mtthornb

-the two new stock 3d asset packs I promised were in development, are finally available on itch.io.

https://matthornb.itch.io

But – and this is a key thing – I could still really use support to get Miniature Multiverse done soon.

And no, I haven’t yet resumed my efforts on Etsy, but at some point I will. The video ‘Freeway’ is complete, and the new House Trek is in production. I am currently working on a systemic overhaul of nearly all my websites with OpenElement and if some things occasionally seem a bit more defective than usual in next few weeks it is probable they’ll be fixed soon, but as usual you would be well advised to refresh any pages that seem broken or massively out of date. If a page is soon gone entirely, removed, the content is probably just redesigned with a new organizational structure and filename, it is NOT gone. Try refreshing or returning to the domain root, then refreshing. And if that fails, try again a few hours later or a few days later. This should work in 99+% of problem cases.  Seriously, it will all be better in many ways (visually, navigationally… in performance and responsiveness terms too) once this transition process is over and the data is all restructured and redesigned.

Right now I am pursuing a lot of work on Amazon’s mTurk and it doesn’t pay well, but it might be enough to cover the remaining miniature supplies and some other costs, by mid October. But again, if you want to help get that moving ahead faster, try buying something from the above shops, or backing me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/matthornb (or Ko-fi – https://ko-fi.com/matthornb  –    if you only want to commit to a small one off payment) or, maybe hiring me via the HornbostelProductions shop. I am not merely offering made to order personalized art in numerous forms, I am now posting an option in which you could pay me to make a virtual tour / virtual world for you or for someone you care about, as a gift item. It is less expensive than you may expect; right now prices amount to roughly $2/ hr, so if you are choosing one of the more costly options it is still only around $28 to order a large, detailed realtime 3d world based on your creative visual ideas, and I can turn it around in a week or so, and give you a playable Windows application at the end of that week. That is pretty cool!

Anyway, thank you all for staying around, I realize things have moved slowly but I am still trying, I have not given up. I think sooner or later something I am trying will work out and my network will take off. patreOnce that happens it’ll be pretty amazing.

 

Making some new videos this summer, not just stock media, plus handmade artworks and finishing ‘Miniature Multiverse’ (hopefully)

My current plan involves the following sequence of events:

#1) Wrapping up and releasing the stock-media asset pack updates on Itch.IO, including an expanded ‘Marshes & Meadows’ and two new collections of 3d assets beyond that. Expected timing is late June, with the sale running from end of June through July 4th. I’d attempted to be ready for the entire duration of the Itch Summer Sale but things aren’t progressing quickly enough. So the start of that sale was officially June 21, and I had reworked my plan for June 24th or 25th when it became clear this would not be ready for the 21st, and now that it’s the 25th, I’m very close but realistically the 27th-29th is now looking like a probable release timeframe. But whenever this stuff IS a bit more polished and ready to launch, you’ll see a video on my Itch profile, 15 mins. long, an extensive overview of my work, especially work related to Itch.IO releases & content.

The sale will include massive discounts as well, especially on a bundle of all five stock media packs ($1.49 for five different stock media collections together in one incredible bundle, essentially 30 cents each!)

#2) I also have been slightly reducing prices and broadening options on eBay, and I posted a brand new fantasy artwork for sale too, I created it on the afternoon/evening of the 24th, over a span of 3 1/2 hours. Opening bid is $8.99. You can view my eBay profile here as usual, and the fantasy item in particular, here. 

All the eBay activity is partly to raise funding, but also in preparation for a stock-media DVD launch coinciding with the new Itch.IO releases. Basically, it’ll be all five of my massive stock media collections that do or soon will, exist digitally on Itch, together on a physical DVD complete with disc art, cover art, shipped to customers through eBay. So the eBay ramp up in activity is intended to coincide with the equivalent excitement at Itch.IO.

#3) With the eBay and Itch frenzy wrapped up, ideally I’ll have raised a couple hundred $, or something close to that, and it’d get me to the point of funding the remaining content of ‘Miniature Multiverse‘ which STILL IS MISSING THE LAST HANDFUL OF MINIATURE WORLDS! So while I *could* plausibly raise that cash elsewhere, over the next month, if I want to do so before end of July, I will need something to happen on eBay / itch.

If you’re wondering why I recently bought a handful of items on eBay, incidentally, which have zero connection to that, including a batch of candy gummies and some lighting stuff [filters and a light] plus a bit of children’s clothing… yeah, I am recording a couple of comedy family videos with my nephews and niece, all of them under the age of seven. So they have short attention spans and candy is key to keeping them on task as the 20-minute mark hits. Plus the light stuff is related, as is the roll of blue paper I’m using as a improvised cheapo bluescreen. And the clothes, I want to be sure there’ll be shirts that won’t have any blue in the design, as blue would get keyed out! So yeah, sometimes for holidays I’ll grab something (the flower items for Mothers’ Day) or for projects. In the case of the current video projects, we’ll see if there’s a way to get everyone onboard with the idea of posting that stuff online, but for now I’m just focused on getting those videos made in the first place. So that… the videos in question include a short called ‘Freeway’ in which the children are forced not to watch TV, they get upset, drive off in a car, on their own, and a ridiculous chase ensues. The other video is “House Trek: The Next Generation, Season 1” and that is a follow up to the ancient HT TOS series of absurd sci-fi videos I did and which can be viewed (some of them at least) on HornbostelVideos.com.

Only this time it has an actual cast, better production values (in terms of set stuff, props, etc) and a real narrative arc across the handful of episodes that constitute Season 1. The cast of HTTNG S1 includes me [as the crazy inventor uncle] and the kids [who accidentally initiate a launch sequence and cause the adventure to develop] and Katie [my sister / their mom] as well as my parents. This should be fun. You’ll see what I mean someday.

I’m recording this in much higher quality too. Really, it’s 1080p, good pristine 1080p too, some shot in 1080p, some in 2.7k and downscaled sharply. I could go higher res than that even but I think an HD final edit makes sense for a few reasons, mainly that 1080p is about as high as many PC monitors and mobile tablets can display anyway, and it’s the highest resolution that works for BluRays. But the bottom line is it’s real high end HD and it should look nice when done.

I am hoping that despite spending near $120 on the pair of video shoots, that I’ll still be able to cover the Miniature Multiverse stuff too, sometime in July. It’ll be the end of the month if no sales are made on eBay/Itch and maybe early/mid July if things go unexpectedly really well on my sales. But the project *will* move forward soon to completion, one way or another.

And so will the ‘older’ video projects. I had worried that a significant chunk of my video core data on videos recorded during the last couple years, would be unrecoverable and that in the worst case the videos would be severely weakened as a result of the data losses. But I’ve, with a mix of clever digital methods, been able to recover almost everything at this point, that was key to those. The resulting reality is this: Now those videos can also continue and move forward again. And that’s great news.

So, for example, Fortress Siege 2 is going to happen. And a few other videos too, will be part of what I’ll be working on from October-December 2019, after the release of Miniature Multiverse. If that launch goes well I may even be able to overhaul some of my hardware/software workflow and that may result in some cool VFX imagery and techniques / technology that you’ve never seen me pull off before!

Well, let’s just see how this goes, shall we? 🙂

 

 

Revised roadmap & a challenge for everyone

  1. I’ll be posting two new stock media packs [3d asset packs] on my Itch.IO page sometime soon, probably within the next 5-10 days. These are the ‘Forests & Flowers’ and ‘Snow & Sand’ packs that I’ve been working on. They’ll be $1.10 each except during sales or in bundle pricing situations.
  2. I’m trying to update some websites a bit more, I’ve already overhauled MiniatureMultiverse.com somewhat, and TriumphantArtists.com should see a few small fixes & updates soon as well, along with minor improvements across some of my other websites.
  3. I’m actively ordering a bunch of additional art supplies, shipping supplies, and DVDs/DVD cases. Why? I intend to launch all the Itch.IO content together as a singular $14.99 DVD product on eBay and here as well. I also intend to make a new batch of artworks and sell those too.  As in, giant 24″x36″ size artworks, big, beautiful pieces with prices starting around $23.99.
  4. All this stuff going on will coincide with a staggering mix of ad campaigns that should draw in thousands of people and generate crazy levels of traffic from March 15 – April 15. The total cost is estimated at $45, or $1.50 spent on the campaign per day.
  5. I have some fan art stuff going on, behind schedule, but it is happening nonetheless. I also have some updates on RedeemerDocumentary.com heading in soon; you’ll see more content relating to the virtual church building tour which is nearing completion. I am also digitally reconstructing my old house in Houston, TX, and between all the various examples piling up, of my ability to realistically reconstruct architectural spaces, well… I’ll be posting a sale item here which essentially allows for people to hire me to make a made-to-order 3d level/tour for them in Unity.
  6. All the [still unposted] House Trek videos are going to be posted on HornbostelVideos.com shortly, except for the making-of stuff, and the animated DVD menus. And that’s just part of what’ll be posted. Watch for a PDF ebook, and also a printed paper equivalent, that showcases essentially all my work, with an emphasis on the creative process and what I’ve learned by doing all the stuff I’ve done [relating to game development, video production, handmade art, etc] it’s an insightful history summing up the last two decades of my life and it has hundreds of pics – giving you an inside look at a lot of things only friends and family know about so far, massive piles of interesting stuff the internet in general, currently has no idea exists. And no, not a puff piece, I very clearly and bluntly describe my mistakes and errors in judgement, and offer useful advice on solving common issues, that’ll make creative efforts hopefully easier for you than things have been for me.
  7. All of this sale stuff being launched, the artworks and other items, the book, stock media packs/DVDs, and the month-long ad campaign… it’s all a gambit to secure funding to do all the stuff I’m hoping to do by year’s end. I have three videos to shoot, about a dozen to actually finish, plus game content, including Vivid Minigolf v2, and Miniature Multiverse, those two in particular are challenging insofar as they each still have unresolved costs of over $250, in miniature materials alone. And then tack on the $450+ goals in funding between the three videos I’d like to record, plus all the other stuff involved… yeah, basically I hope this plays out well. If I don’t have close to $1k earned by end of Spring 2019, it means a lot of the goals for summer and fall of this year will fall through. And, quite bluntly, if you’re as tired of the slow rate of progress around here as I am, I’m pretty much begging you to buy something of mine, because if sales volume across my web network climbs high enough, and the percentage of visitors who transition to buyers climbs from a current level of 0.0135% to 5%, that’d change almost everything around here! (I seriously have thousands of visitors – around 2500 – every week, across my various websites and shops, and yet the majority of weeks nothing is actually sold anywhere on my network.)

Seven quick updates for everyone here!

  1. It looks like the data on my problem hard drives will partially or entirely be recoverable. It’s an ongoing process that’s expensive and slow, but going well so far and not as costly as I’d expected initially.
  2. My nephews and niece will be in the new house about 20% of the time, not 40-50% as had been the case my first 3 months in Pittsburgh. That means I’ll have more potential for productivity from here on out.
  3. All eBay orders people placed from me, were shipped out successfully some time ago, i.e. around October, so I’ve caught up on all of that, and it seems like the frustrations and complaints of several customers will likely be resolved.
  4. Activity across my web network has been climbing steadily after the resumed operation of the sites and the extensive display fixes for mobile users, which are underway and mostly already applied at this time.
  5. Itch.IO has become a big focus for me; I launched the TACC2018 content there and the 2018 Bonus Autumn pack in time for Halloween 2018, and intend to have two new products – a Miniature Multiverse extras pack with artbook, and a batch of textured 3D models of plants and details for outdoor nature scenes – released in time for a massive and very promising Thanksgiving sale [Nov. 20th-30th, 2018]*
  6. The fiscal situation here is good but not great; the Halloween sale was successful enough to show potential but not actually anywhere near enough to cover remaining costs of completing ‘Miniature Multiverse‘. I think if the Thanksgiving sale goes well, an end-of-2018 release is still possible, if uncertain, and if it turns out to be only marginally successful, then you should all expect the completed project to be released around late January 2019 or early February.
  7. Other things like fan art modding projects and a long list of video productions which were delayed due to inaccessible data may yet be resumed but only after Miniature Multiverse launches. Apologies to the adventure game fans who, for most of the past 15 years, have been sitting around waiting for new content to play! And apologies also to my family who will have to wait even more, until Christmas 2019 for all the family videos I’ve recorded after 2010 [give or take] to make it to the finish line! [I.e. ‘1999’, ‘Globe’ and ‘Fortress Siege 2’.]

Halloween Sale & new stock media pack!

The price of downloading TACC 2018 has just dropped from $3.99 to just $1.50. There’s also a completely new $1.00 stock-media pack with 201 new texture image files and 15 new HD video clips of fire/explosions:

BETTER YET: Through October 31, 2018, both of these are 45% off or 50% off when bought together in a bundle. That’s $1.25 for a huge archive of royalty-free stock media that you can use in your own creative projects!

LINKS:

TACC 2018 [Triumphant Artists Complete Collection 2018]: https://matthornb.itch.io/tacc2018

Bonus Autumn 2018 Collection: https://matthornb.itch.io/autumn-2018-bonus-collection