Auto Assembly Target 2006, the UK Transformers convention taking place on Saturday 3rd of June in Birmingham, England has now set the cut-off date for pre-registrations for fans wishing to book from outside of the UK. Anyone wishing to register who DOES NOT live in the UK will need to book using the online booking system and pay by PayPal by Saturday 20th May 2006 AT THE LATEST to guarantee your place at the convention.

We have had to set this date to ensure that we can process your booking in time and make sure that your booking confirmations are shipped to you before you travel allowing you to get into the convention! With airmail taking several days within Europe and about a week for the rest of the world this should give everyone enough time to get your confirmation slips and information packs.

With Auto Assembly Target 2006 less than six weeks away, if you are thinking about coming along to the convention, you need to get your bookings in NOW to guarantee your place. With David Kaye, the voice of Megatron, making his European convention debut and Auto Assembly having the biggest guest line-up ever for a European convention, this is one event you don’t want to miss!

We will be announcing the cut-off dates for UK postal and online bookings shortly.

Simon and Sven,
Auto Assembly Target 2006

www.autoassembly.org.uk

Simon Plumbe, one of the organisors of UK convention Auto Asembly, has posted a message in our forum about the need for help in getting the best guests for AA2005 next year. Please have a look at what he’s said here, visit the Auto Assembly website and help support the convention so that we can get the very best people over to see us.

People like Frank and Peter are *extremely* busy so getting them on that basis alone is difficult although I have got contact details for both so approaching them isn’t hard to do.

The one thing we want to make sure of with voice actors is that we invite guests who really WANT to be at Auto Assembly and that covers guests ranging from comic artists/writers, voice actors and everyone else and the voice actors we’ve been talking to so far really want to come along.

The big problem for us is money and I can’t stress that enough. Based on the registration cost, we can’t afford ANY voice actors without some form of additional support. If we get enough bookings to fill AA2005 to capacity AND we get some additional income (for example though merchandise sales of AA2004’s magazine, the Auto Assembly DVD etc.) then we *might* be able to afford to bring Wally back for next year.

For any other voice actor, we will need some form of sponsorship or other help. We are talking to possible sponsors but this is going to involve a lot of intense negotiation but there are no guarantees and we are not talking about a small amount of money. We have been talking to voice actors to get estimated costs for appearances and we are talking about THOUSANDS of pounds to bring voice actors over to the UK.

For AA2004, Wally came over ECONOMY class for his flight, something that he couldn’t do again (it was really painful for him to cope with the 12 hour flight) and all he asked for was his flight and hotel costs. The other actors who have expressed an interest in attending have just asked for expenses i.e. flights and accommodation.

There are some actors who will expect appearance fees as well as the above so we would need a lot of money to make it happen but it CAN be done IF fans are willing to help us make it happen…

If you go to the Auto Assembly website you’ll see a lot of adverts spread throughout the site. These all help raise money for Auto Assembly. For a lot of these, we get commission on sales if people make purchases after visiting links, and with others we get payments if people sign up for free services etc.

Some offer fantastic payments (Morgan Auctions, for example, pay us £2 for each registration!) and if we can get a good income from these then we can do everything possible to get VAs for 2005. We’ve used these advertisers ourselves so we can vouch for the quality of them, and there’s something for everyone. We’ve also got access to a lot more and we’ll be adding more to the site over time.

I know I’ve said this before, but everyone reading this (and every visitor to the TF.net site if it was mentioned as a news story) could help to try and make it happen.

Auto Assembly, Europe’s Premier Transformer Convention, has started podcasting. Here’s the email announcing the release:

Hi everyone!

Just thought we’d let you all know about a new development we’ve been working on to compliment the Auto Assembly conventions that you might be interested in… Podcasts!!

Basically, we’re producing a series of what can be best described as FREE downloadable radio shows in MP3 format  and each show is going to be a mixed bag of things. The main thrust of the show will be to bring you all the latest news and developments of each forthcoming convention with a lot of news being exclusive to the show, weeks before it will appear on the website or the Auto Assembly forum. As well as that, the shows will have interviews, chat, competitions, music, live “phone-ins” and much more besides!!

The first show is available now is runs for 35 minutes and you can find it at http://www.autoassembly.org.uk/podcast.htm and we have even set up a section on the Auto Assembly Forum dedicated to the podcasts at http://autoassembly.proboards7.com/index.cgi?board=podcast

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the show and if you want to comment on it, you can get in touch at podcast@autoassembly.org.uk or chat about it on the forum. See you around on the board and hopefully we’ll see you at Auto Assembly Target 2006 in June!!

Simon and Sven
Auto Assembly Target 2006

http://www.autoassembly.org.uk

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.

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!!

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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”