Auto Assembly 2005 Pre-Bookings CLOSED!!

We have now closed the pre-bookings for Auto Assembly 2005 as we are in the final packing stages and getting ready to go over to the Clarendon Suites so we can’t process any more bookings properly! If yuo have already pre-booked, your confirmation slips have been posted and should be with you in time for AA2005 if you have not already received them.

We do still have around 100 places available for those of you planning on coming along on the day, but we would advise you all to get here early to get a good place in the queue as once we hit the cut-off point, we will not be able to let anyone else in! On-the-door prices are £10 for adults and £7.50 for children, students etc.

If you have pre-registered and not received your confirmation slips by the time you leave to come along you will need to ensure that you bring the following – PayPal order confirmation (including the transaction ID), proof of personal ID including address (such as mobile phone bill). If you don’t have either of these, it could delay your admission into the event.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all this weekend!!

AA2005 Final Guest Update

Sadly Lee Sullivan won’t be able to join us at Auto Assembly this year due to unforseen family commitments. However, we do have an item for the auction signed by him and he will be back with us for Auto Assembly 2006. However, we do have a surprise….

Also, because of staff shortages, Maximum Entertainment have just informed us today that they will not be able to make it this year. However, we will be still filming Auto Assembly 2005 ourselves (and we are still looking for volunteers!) and hopefully the edited footage will be used on the RiD box set appearing later this year. They are going to be sending some items along for us to give away as prizes though.

Geoff Senior To Attend Auto Assembly 2005!!

Transformers comic legend Geoff Senior will be making his first Auto Assembly appearance this weekend! He will be around to sign autographs and will be taking part in the comic panel at 1 00 pm.

Just a quick reminder for you that the closing date for pre-bookings for Auto Assembly 2003 is 19th July – less than 2 weeks away!!!! It’s going so well that they now have more prebookings for this year than they had people actually at the last event, which is great!!!

The UK/European Transformers event, Auto Assembly, has already confirmed the first few details for Auto Assembly 2005, just over a week after it’s 2004 convention has ended!!

The provisional date for the event is Saturday 4th June 2005 and ticket prices for those who pre-book are going to be £7.50 for adults and £6 for children/concessions with on-the-door tickets likely to be slightly higher. Prices next year do not include Issue 7 of the event magazine, The Cybertronian Times, which will be available as an optional add-on.

Auto Assembly 2005 is being held in Birmingham, England and is in a brand new venue for 2005. We have been looking at venues for a while and there is one in particular that we are VERY excited about at the moment which offers a very spacious single hall with everything that we are looking for.

We just have a few details that we need to finalise with the venue and other issues and if all goes well we hope to be able to make the final announcements and start taking bookings in the next couple of weeks as well as announcing the first few guests! The event is, as with all Auto Assembly events, non-profit making, and will be raising funds for charity through a charity auction and raffle.

In 2004, we were joined by over 320 Transformers fans from all over the UK (with some visiting from overseas), we had seven guests from the world of Transformers, and we expect Auto Assembly 2005 to be even bigger! With our fundraising efforts we managed to raise over £1,000 for our two charities and we’d like to thank everyone for their support. Reports and photos are being added to the Auto Assembly website on a daily basis.

Full details will be on the Auto Assembly website at www.autoassembly.org.uk and we’ll be posting updates and answering questions on the Auto Assembly forum. Alternatively, email us for more details.

Simon Plumbe and Sven Harvey
Auto Assembly 2005

web – www.autoassembly.org.uk
email – enquiries@autoassembly.org.uk

forum – http://autoassembly.proboards7.com

We are now proud to announce that there will be a charity auction taking place at the UK Transformers event, Auto Assembly 2004, on 8th and 9th May 2004. The auction will be held in aid of the NSPCC and Cancer Research. We already have a number of great items, with more being added on a regular basis.

The auction itself will form part of Saturday’s programme of activities and there will be a mix of three types of items. First are items donated to the auction which will have 100% of the proceeds going to charity. In addition, there will be scope for individuals and organisations/dealers to put items into the auction, and these will be offered with 10% of the closing bid going to charity.

In terms of items, we will be approaching a number of companies and we have also been in touch with a large number of Transformers voice actors and people involved behind the scenes with different shows, and we already have a number of great items connected with most Transformers eras – G1, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, RiD, Armada and Energon!!

We can now announce the first few items, which we think will surprise a lot of fans! As we said, we have been working closely with a large number of Transformers

10″x8″ signed colour photo of David Kaye (yesssssss!)
7″x5″ signed colour photo of Neil Ross (Slag, Bonecrusher, Crosshairs,
Hook, Sixshot; Slag, Springer and more from G1!)
A4 signed colour print from Wally Wingert (SideBurn and Mirage from RiD)

We have also had a rather special item donated by McDonalds… We have been given one of the extremely rare forecourt banners from the recent Armada Happy Meals promotion. These were only distributed to the drive-thru restaurants, and their company policy is that these are NOT released from the company for any reason, so this is probably the only one that will be available to fans! The banner itself is made from very durable all-weather plastic, with a webbed backing for addition strength and measures a massive 14ft long by 3ft high!!

We will be announcing even more items and autographs shortly, hopefully in the next 48 hours! Photos of all of these items, with long descriptions, are on the Auto Assembly website.

As an added bonus, we will be working closely with many of these actors and companies to bring you even more for Auto Assembly! McDonalds have donated a number of gift vouchers which will be used for competitions during the Auto Assembly weekend, and Wally Wingert has kindly recorded some EXCLUSIVE dialogue for us as SideBurn that has been uploaded to the Auto Assembly website talking about AA2004!! We are already in talks with other actors who are donating items to the auction to get even more exclusive sound clips and other surprises!

In addition to the auction, we will also be holding a charity raffle, and we are expecting to have some pretty good items for that covering all TF generations!

We are also still hoping to be able to announce our voice actor for Auto Assembly in the near future as well, although this will be dependent on the number of pre-bookings we get and dealers who book up so if you want to see an exclusive voice actor, and have a chance to bid on these great items, book for Auto Assembly 2004 NOW!!

For further information, see the Auto Assembly website at www.autoassembly.org.uk or join the discussion on our forum at http://autoassembly.proboards7.com and active members of the forum will qualify for a 10% discount on ticket prices.

We can be contacted by email at enquiries@autoassembly.org.uk or by telephone on 07860 948296. If there are any dealers or individuals who would like to donate items for these, please get in touch.

Simon and Sven
Auto Assembly 2004

We just received this email from the chaps at Auto Assembly, looks like it’s gonna be a good’n. We’ll have an interview with Simon coming shortly, but for now over to the guys for a word about AA 2004.

Auto Assembly 2004, the two-day UK/European Transformers convention that is
taking place over the weekend of 8th-9th May 2004 in Birmingham, England. The
deadline for booking tickets to get a 5% discount on ticket prices is
approaching fast. The general closing date for pre-bookings is the end of April,
but the deadline for booking tickets with the 5% early booking discount is now
just SEVEN days away!

We are still offering 10% discounts for people who are active members of the
Auto Assembly discussion forum and the convention is shaping up to be a great
weekend. We have a great range of guest speakers including our guest of honour –
RiD’s Wally Wingert (the voice of Sideburn and Mirage), Simon Furman, Andrew
Wildman, Lee Sullivan and Jane Lawson and Joanna Moher from Metrodome who will
be filming the convention to appear on a future UK DVD box set).

As well as the guests (with different speakers on each day) we are offering a
packed weekend of activities. There is going to be a charity auction with signed
photos and rare items, dealers from across the UK, toy and art displays,
competitions, video screenings, a games room and much more.

Tickets are just £15 for the full weekend and include a pack of goodies
including a 56 page colour convention magazine and other free gifts including
convention exclusive postcards with art from Andrew Wildman.

For more information, visit the website or email us for more details. We can
take bookings online and full details are on the website.

Simon and Sven
Auto Assembly 2004

web – www.autoassembly.org.uk
email – enquiries@autoassembly.org.uk
forum – http://autoassembly.proboards7.com

2007, the year that Transformers becomes a major Hollywood franchise, but the UK will be lagging slightly with the announcement that there will be NO Auto Assembly 2007! This means that there will be no UK Transformers convention in 2007, with the cancellation of Transforce 2007 last year. This will mark the first time since 1998, when Beast Wars was keeping the Transformers brand alive, that no Transformers focused convention will take place in the UK!

TheTransformers.Net hope both Auto Assembly and Transforce both return in 2008 bigger and better than ever, with the full support of the UK Transformers community.

Here is what Simon Plumbe of Auto Assembly had to say

“Auto Assembly, Europe’s largest Transformers convention, has sadly decided to have a break and not go ahead with running a convention in 2007, the year of the release of the long-awaited live-action Transformers movie…Since Auto Assembly 2006, convention organisers Simon and Sven have had to deal with a large number of personal issues that have placed a great deal of strain upon themselves and many of these are likely to continue well into 2007 including many personal health issues. This is going to place a great deal of pressure on both of them and we both feel that this would place too many compromises on the quality of any Auto Assembly convention that we would want to run and that we wouldn’t be able to dedicate as much time to it as we would want to.

Rather than delivering an event that might not live up to the standards that we would want to bring you, we have decided to have a “gap year” and come back refreshed so Auto Assembly WILL be back in 2008, bigger and better than ever!! We’re looking at past events to se how we can improve on what we’ve done before, how we can add new activities and events, we’ll bring you the best dealers and guests we can and as we’ll have longer to prepare we’ll be able to bring you the best charity auction EVER!!

We know that all of you who are regular Auto Assembly attendees and those of you who were planning on attending your first Auto Assembly convention in 2007 will be disappointed, but we think that it’s better for you all to be able to attend an event where we, as organisers are in one piece physically AND mentally and we’re properly prepared than something that’s rushed and where the team really aren’t in a state to be there and do anything and give 100% to the event so you get the best convention we can possibly give you and we all hope that you’ll join us in 2008…

However, we’re not going to sit on our laurels and do nothing in 2007 and we DO have some great plans in store for the forthcoming year…

First up, we’ve been quiet with them for a while, but we’re going to start recording the Auto Assembly Podcasts again! We’ve already got the second half of our interview with Transformers artist Simon Williams lined up that we started in the third show and we’ve got a massive library of almost 500 pieces of music at our disposal so expect to see the fourth show online for downloading soon…!

Show four is already in the pre-production stage with the music currently being selected and the show notes being prepared. We’ll be editing the interview with Simon Williams shortly, and all being well, we’re hoping to start recording soon and the show should be online in the next 3-4 weeks!

We’re also going to be doing a “stock-take” of everything we have here at Infinite Frontiers/Auto Assembly and find out exactly what we have lying around! Once we’ve done this, you can expect to see all sorts of goodies on sale ranging from back issues of our convention fanzine The Cybertronian Times, our latest fanzine MiniCT, the Auto Assembly Pin Badges, postcards from all our conventions and other goodies including TF graphic novels, PC games featuring work from Andrew Wildman, and much more. All the proceeds from these will go towards our annual running costs and towards our guest budget for Auto Assembly 2008 and you’ll find items on sale through the AA website, eBay and TFAuctions.com

The stock-take will also give us the chance to see what leftover items we have from our goodie bags from past conventions… and all of these will end up in early goodie bags for Auto Assembly 2008 and we can already confirm some items for the first 80+ attendees so we think we’re already going to have a great selection of free gifts for all of you when the convention returns!!

We’re still going to carry on with our publishing activities and we’ve got some great ideas planned here. The first thing we’re working on here is to take all of the entries from the Auto Assembly Target 2006 fiction competition and put them all together in a FREE downloadable fanzine that will be available on the website in the next 3-4 weeks! Once it’s online, you’ll be able to go to the Auto Assembly Forum and vote on your favourite story and the entry with the most votes will be declared the belated winner of the fiction competition from the convention!

After that, we’ll be working on Issue 9 of The Cybertronian Times. While we won’t be having a convention in 2007, we will still be looking at producing a fanzine and this will be out some time during the year and this will be available to pre-order and buy online sometime during the year with proceeds going towards Auto Assembly 2008’s guest budget. At the same time, we are going to be looking at producing more issues of our low-budget fiction-based fanzine MiniCT which again you can order online.

Finally on the fanzine front, we are hoping to take some of the back issues of The Cybertronian Times that are now out of print and converting these to PDF files. Some of these may be made available freely, the others will be available for a nominal charge but more news on these when they’re ready!

For those of who who want to keep in touch with us online, our forum is still going strong and we’ve recently given it a small restructure to make things easier to find and if you’re not already a member, you’re more than welcome to join. Naturally, all the latest news and developments on Auto Assembly will appear on the forum FIRST!!

To tie-in with the forum, we’re hoping to arrange a series of informal meets and get-togethers for our members throughout the year, and hopefully doing something to coincide with the movie if anyone is interested in seeing it as a group.

Finally, while there won’t be an AUTO ASSEMBLY in 2007, there WILL be an event from us here at INFINITE FRONTIERS… we are currently in the early concept stages of preparing to run a small scale sci-fi and collectors fair here in Birmingham some time in 2007!! It will be a similar event to those found across the UK with dealers and VERY cheap admission price covering Transformers, comics, sci-fi merchandise and everything else.. but we’ll release more details on this as we have it so watch this space!!

* * *

From a UK fan point of view, sadly Transforce 2007 has also been cancelled so right now the UK is without a convention for 2007. Right now, we don’t know if there will be any other events taking place in the UK in 2007 but if there are, rest assured that we will be giving them our complete support.

We know that 2007 won’t be a quiet year for Transformers fans in the UK, especially with the increased activity from Hasbro UK and other related companies, which has in some way contributed to our problems with Auto Assembly as well, which had left us little room to decide when we could have held Auto Assembly 2007 had we been able to but at least there will be things taking place, especially with Hasbro’s expected presence at Memorabilia at the NEC in Birmingham in July.

* * *

Well, feel free to get in touch and we hope to see some of you on the forum, at some of our forum meets, at our collectors’s fair later this year, and at Auto Assembly 2008!

Simon and Sven
Auto Assembly”