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.

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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…..

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

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.

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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”