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 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

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.

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!!!

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

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