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

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 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