Auto Assembly - THE FUTURE

[Dezzeh]

Slightly off topic.. But if this year was the last AA, what has Sven rejoined the committee for, I worry we are now looking at competing conventions

[blueshift]

Aug 29, 2015 12:33:08 GMT Dezzeh said:

Slightly off topic.. But if this year was the last AA, what has Sven rejoined the committee for, I worry we are now looking at competing conventions

They said that there would still be AA-related stuff like youtube videos and a site whatever that means, I guess we will find out.

[Hero]

Nice to see the AA brand continuing. It looks like Simon and the team have big plans for the Youtube channel.

[Andy Turnbull]

Aug 29, 2015 12:33:08 GMT Dezzeh said:

Slightly off topic.. But if this year was the last AA, what has Sven rejoined the committee for, I worry we are now looking at competing conventions

This year's Auto Assembly was the last year of it being a convention, but things such as the YT channel and smaller meets and fanzines under the AA umbrella will continue.

Andy

[Andy Turnbull]

Also in the interests of neatness I've put this into it's own thread rather than clogging up the TFN thread.

Andy

[Deleted]

Hi guys,

Sorry for not replying to this sooner. I've been away from a lot of forums lately and out of touch from things recently. Family life has taken top priority as well as a lot of other personal matters that have come along as well as working on all of the new projects and plans for all of us here at Auto Assembly.

Anyway, to very briefly attempt to sum up what's going on here, we've actually been around as an organisation since 1989 under our original name Infinite Frontiers and Andy T was actually a reader of one of our older digital Star Trek fanzines back in the 90s long before we made the move into Transformers (but that's another story altogether!).

With Auto Assembly, what we're doing is refocusing and taking almost a back-to-basics approach. We started things off, Transformers at least, with The Cybertronian Times in 1998 so that's where we're taking things and we released the latest issue, Issue 17, as a 100@ digital mag a couple of days ago. It's now being released quarterly as a FREE PDF and we're already well underway with work on the next issue. We've also got our new Youtube channel which will have a mix of archive con footage and brand new specially recorded content, we're planning a new podcast, we'll be hosting meets in several cities, and kickstarting our charity fundraising again.

There are other things in the pipeline as well but we're trying to finetune our plans here but obviously we need a team to make all of this happen, hence the recruiting and growth plans. So far we have a team of five but this is set to expand. We're talking regularly to other people but we're looking at a mix of people - some Auto Assembly veterans, some newbies but everyone will have one thing in common... a passion for Transformers and an enthusiasm for what we are planning and hoping to do!

We have been asked about whether the convention will come back (we were approached by a few people asking us and offering us support to bring the con back for 2016) but there's nothing on the cards right now. The reality is that our personal lives have got to come first and we've had a long time of not having any sort of summer break to spend with our families to give that time up for other people. This may sound selfish, but just on a personal level I've barely spent any time during the school holidays with my daughter for the last six years so other families have had something to do with their kids and no matter how you look at it, that's not right.

Virtually all of our team are parents and we strongly believe that family has to come first so anything we do - meets, fanzines, podcasts etc - will be 100% family friendly.