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

Anyone planning on attending the Midlands Transformers convention ‘Auto Assembly’
(like I will be) might like to know they’ve announced confirmed guests, RiD voice
actor Wally Wingert (who voiced Sideburn, the TF with a car fetish and Mirage),
Marvel/Dreamwave writer Simon Furman and artists Lee Sullivan and Andrew Wildman.
Fans who visited the last Botcon Europe will know the RiD voice actors are a very
humorous lot, so it’s sure too be entertaining.

www.autoassembly.org.uk

Check out the Auto Assmebly 2004/Guests section for full details.

Hi everyone!

We’re only SIX days away now from Auto Assembly Target 2006 on 3rd June here in Birmingham, England and we thought we’d bring you another news update covering a few key areas of the convention. We’ve got important updates on bookings, the charity auction and more besides…

BOOKINGS

Bookings are still coming in and we want to update you all on the situation here. For everyone who has pre-registered so far, we have now sent out all of the confirmation slips/packs for everyone who has pre-registered up to midnight on Friday 26th May 2006. All of bookings we have received since then will be posted out Tuesday 30th May by first class post and should reach you by Thursday 1st June at the latest.

However, for those of you who do live in the UK and who have not pre-booked there is STILL time to pre-register IF you book in the next 48 hours! As long as we receive your booking online by 10 00 am on Tuesday 30th May, we will be able to process them and send them out the same day. We can’t guarantee to process any bookings received beyond this point.

At 11 00 am on 30th May we will be making the final draw to see who is taking part in the consulation exercise taking place at the convention so you still have a chance to get involved in that part of the convention as well!!

PLACES REMAINING

At the time of writing, there are approximately 130 places left for Auto Assembly Target 2006 including on-the-door places which is fewer than last year. While Auto Assembly 2005 was NOT a complete sell out, we have had considerably more bookings than last year at this point and we are expecting to have more places confirmed in the next couple of days that have been provisionally reserved so this figure will be reduced. With expected local press coverage also expected prior to the convention we still STRONGLY recommend pre-booking while you still can.

CHARITY AUCTION

For those of you interested, we are hoping to be able to take credit card payments (via PayPal) for items in the charity auction. We are currently working on having internet access at the convention although this will be for admistrative use only. We must stress that such payments will be subject to a 5% handling fee as we are charged by PayPal for all payments received. We will also be able to accept card payments for purchases from the Auto Assembly registration desk for merchandise including copies of our event magazine, other items and Titan Books graphic novels that we will be selling.

GUIDO GUIDI SKETCHES

Guido Guidi will be doing sketches for fans at Auto Assembly although we have been asked by sponsors TF Auctions to stress that – because of time – these will be limited although Guidi will be happy to sign autographs throughout the day.

GOODIE BAG UPDATE

While we were preparing the goodie bag, we have been able to confirm the exact numbers of most of the items we have available in the packs for everyone this year. The situation is as follows – Ladybird G1 books (first 139 attendees), G2 Colouring/Activity books (first 294 attendees), Cards Inc G1 Stickers (first 340 attendees), and for every attendee are – Auto Assembly Postcard #002 (Simon Williams), Auto Assembly Postcard #003 (Guido Guidi), Model & Collector’s Mart magazine, and a bag of Transform-A-Snacks. We are still waiting for a delivery of assorted items from Metrodome which will include various postcards but we don’t know how many of these there will be.

COLOURING COMPETITION

One for all our younger attendees… we’ve got a free competition lined up. Just pick up a colouring sheet with a lineart version of one of our postcards and a FREE pack of colouring pencils from the registration desk and just hand your entry in later in the day to be judged by some of our guests. We’ve got some great prizes on offer for the winners!

* * *

Well, that’s it for this update so you’ve only got TWO DAYS to decide if you want to pre-register but we want to see as many of you there as possible to help us break the European Transformers Convention attendance record for the second year running! It’s going to be another great event and we’d love to see you all there. Book online or find out more at www.autoassembly.org.uk to decide if you want to come along on the day and we hope to see you all on Saturday!

Simon and Sven,
Auto Assembly Target 2006

www.autoassembly.org.uk

Simon Plumbe has provided us with some updated news on Auto Assembly 2005, the UKs only Transformers Convention this year. First up is a bookings update and for all of you like me who have not booked yet, I would recommended making your mind up quickly. Here’s what Simon said

Hi,

We thought I’d post and give you all and update on the pre-booking situation regarding Auto Assembly 2005 along with a bit of a warning about the state of play we;re in. Bookings are coming in a lot faster than ever before so we’re strongly recommending that you all book sooner rather than later if you’re planning on coming along if you want to get in this year. I’ll come onto why in a minute…

Sorry about this being a long post, but we wanted to make sure we brought you all up to speed on where we are with AA2005 and our bookings.

Pre-Bookings

As we’ve said, bookings are coming in at an astonishing rate but even we’re surprised at how quickly. With four months to go we’ve got almost 100 pre-registrations – about a third of the total from AA2004’s 320 attendees. While this might not seem like a lot, let me try to put this into perspective.

For Auto Assembly usually, bookings are slow and steady with a massive surge in the last 6-8 weeks before, and then we tend to get about 50% more people on the door. AA2000 had 30 people (with 15 pre-registering), AA2001 had 61 (30 pre-reg), AA2003 had 233 (155 pre-reg) and AA2004 had 320 (222 pre-reg). At the moment we have just under 100 booked but the astonishing figure at the moment is where we stand….

With just under 120 days to go, I compared the figures to last year. When we reached this number of pre-registrations last time, we were only 56 days away so as you can see and that was outside of the last-minute rush! If bookings continue at the pace they are coming in, WITHOUT the late rush we can expect about 300+ pre-bookings and about 450 in total. However, if we get the expected last minute rush and the steady increase in rate of bookings as always happens, then it is almost certain that AA will be a sell-out in advance so we will NOT have any on-the-door places available.

Another thing to bear in mind is that we are still talking to sponsors in order to try to bring a voice actor over to the UK again. If this happens again we can expect ticket sales to increase if we make an announcement there.

Finally about a third of those booked so far are new to Auto Assembly and we are reaching a new audience from outside the UK (including Norway and Australia) so more people are making their first venture to AA!!

As you can see, this makes it all the more clear why pre-booking is going to be essential this year and why early registration is going to be a must!

Goodie Bag

We’re still doing our usual Goodie Bag for AA2005 and at the moment there are four items confirmed currently worth about £3.40 including a copy of the latest issue of Model & Collector’s Mart magazine (courtesy of Trinity Publications), a bag of Transform-A-Snacks (thanks to Red Mill Snack Foods), a pack of G1 stickers and a poster.

However, the latter two items are limited to the first 150 pre-registrants and as we are rapidly approaching that figure, we’d strongly recommend you book fast.

We are negotiating for more freebies and hope to announce more soon, but we can’t guarantee that EVERY attendee will get every item and we do expect that more of the goodies will be limited to early registrants so if you want more freebies, the earlier you book the better!

Already Registered?

For those of you who have already registered, I’d like to clarify what we are doing this year regarding tickets. If you don’t know, we lost about about £1,000 last year on Auto Assembly, part of this was because of some people getting in without paying which wasn’t helped with the split-floor set up of the venue. Because pre-registrants had their tickets sent out, and we were short-staffed many went straight to the dealers room and straight in and some who hadn’t paid followed them in. As a result of this happening, we are not sending tickets out in advance this time (although we do have better on-the-door security this time anyway!)…

Anyway, what we are doing is to send out a confirmation slip to everyone along with an information pack which I’m putting the finishing touches to at the moment (easier said than done when we do this in our spare time!). The slips have security measures on them that make them difficult to copy if people try to pass them on to friends or copies to their friends to sneak in twice (believe us, we’ve seen it happen before!).

This slip will have the names and ticket numbers of everyone you have booked for and you’ll need to keep this confirmation slip safe. You need to present this slip on arrival at AA to one of our team where you will then be handed your packs. In there will be your personalised name badges (which you’ll need to wear at all times to gain access to Auto Assembly), your copies of The Cybertronian Times if you pre-ordered it, a copy of the programme for the day, a complete list of all the items in the aution, any other information about AA2005, possible a registration form for AA2006 plus your goodie bag.

* * *

Sorry for the long rant, but we thought you’d want to know where we are with bookings right now! If you’ve got any questions about pre-registration or anything I’ve mentioned here, feel free to ask!

Simon

Auto Assembly 2005

Auto Assembly 2005 is now over and everyone should be looking forward to next years event. First things first, well done to AA2005, Simon and Sven, for a well run event and for breaking the European Transformers Convention record, with an attendance of 406.

AA2006 already has its first guest, David Kaye, the voice of BW/BM/Armada and Energon Megatron. Expect AA2006 to be bigger and better than this years event.

More Auto Assembly news to come over the next few days…..

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”