The Energon Pub

Just recieved an email from the organisers of Auto Assembley saying that there will be no AA'07

heres what they said

[quote]Hi Everyone,

We've had a lot of people ask us lately about Auto Assembly 2007, so we thought we'd contact you all and let you all know what's happening...

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, there is still a chance that Paul Cannon will re-schedule his convention for later in the year and if he does we will give him our backing and support 100% and and help him promote that instead. 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[/quote]


Bummer eh?

Well, that sure sucks. AA was the only one i was going to bother going to.

No other UK ones at all then?

I'm sorry to hear that my friends across the pond.

A great shame as the last two AAs I've been to have been superb, but it's completely understandable given some of the things that befell the organisers in the past few months. I look forward to their triumphant return next year.

Poor Europe.

****

That is indeed sad news. Hasbro should really step in and sponsor these events in some form or fashion. It would be money well spent on the collector's market.

dammit, i killed it. the first time i went was 2006, AND I KILLED IT!

Damn. I understand why its been cancelled but damn.

Yours AK

Well that's a pisser. I expected it but still. Oh well. Roll on AA 08!

****!

I was really lookin forward to seeing all the Seib crew again.

Boo!

Me too. That was pretty much my main reason for going last year. Not a huge amount of figures that I want so it's mingle and guests that I am interested in.

[quote="Glyph"]
Could all just go down for a meet-up anyway. There'd probably be more alcohol involved than at a typical AutoAssembly (:realising the initials 'AA' really don't convey the right thing when alcohol's involved!) but given that the Seibs crew spent most of the time propping up the bar last year, I can't see that being too much of a problem... [/quote]

I like that idea Glyph.

Defo up for that if we can work together on a meet up date and place.

Double bummer.

I know how you guys feel, I'm probably (90% probably) going to miss out on BotCon. It must suck. Now if only their was a Connecticut or New York TF convention...

[quote="zedman"]That is indeed sad news. Hasbro should really step in and sponsor these events in some form or fashion. It would be money well spent on the collector's market.[/quote]

[quote="Glyph"]
Could all just go down for a meet-up anyway. There'd probably be more alcohol involved than at a typical AutoAssembly (:realising the initials 'AA' really don't convey the right thing when alcohol's involved!) but given that the Seibs crew spent most of the time propping up the bar last year, I can't see that being too much of a problem... [/quote]

Im game, your side of the mountains or mine?

NO! PLEASE GOD NO! I WAS SO LOOKING FORWARD TO GOING!

That's a shame. I was really looking forward to going, especially with the buzz from the movie release this year.

Given that it's usually the first weekend in June when I always get the Friday and Monday off and I could have stayed with my uncle in Birmingham whose son is big into TF's and who I was going to bring, that's a major bummer.

Hopefully things will get better for the organisers from now on.

Still at least you guys in England get a convention. Ireland is abysmal when it comes to anything sci-fi or cool.

I remember last year some Irish guys on one of these sites saying they were trying to organise something but nothing came of it.

Once again, reality reminds us how disappointing it can be.

Aim low kids. Aim so low it doesn't even matter if you fail.

Given some of the discusion on the AA boards in the last couple of months this isn't a great surprise. This would have been my third year going and it's always been a great day out. Since Simon and Sven are meant to be organising a Birmingham based collectors fair it may be a good venue for a Seibertronian meet, although this may prove too far to travel without the draw of convention guests/TF specific sellers for a lot of folks. There did indeed seem to be a few of us around the bar for a goodly portion of the day last year (funny that...).

As an aside has Big Grim or any of the other folk who'll understand this ever heard anything else about the thing from last year that we're not supposed to talk about?

I've heard nothing. And I havew been keeping my ear to the ground. I thought it would've been out now considering how far along they were.

[quote="waaaaghlord"]

As an aside has Big Grim or any of the other folk who'll understand this ever heard anything else about the thing from last year that we're not supposed to talk about?[/quote]

not Knowing what tou are talking about I'd say that it'll probably come out alongside all the movie stuff

Thanks for the words of support guys. It was a tough decision to call AA off this year but with the state of our health it was something that we had to do to allow both of us to get through the year.

With the sci-fi fair, we're going to be approaching a mix of general sci-fi dealers, comic dealers, we might have one or two retro video game dealers AND naturally we'll be approaching plenty of TF dealers as well so it should have plenty to appeal to a lot of people on all the TF boards - just on a basic scale and something that's easier for us to plan and no pre-booking, just turn up on the day and MUCH cheaper admission as our overheads will be lower.

As for guests... we DO have some provisional ideas for cheap comic related guest signings (TF and non-TF) although there won't be guest talks planned...

It's all early days right now though but as we get some ideas together and firmed up, we'll let you know!

Get yerselves well and we'll be there next year Simes. Real life has to take priority sometimes!