Regular visitors to the Auto Assembly website will have noticed that things have been quiet here for the last few months. Usually we have tried to add new content on a regular basis, but real life has got in the way recently so we wanted to bring you all a website update as well as give you a teaser for all our plans for 2025…
2024 – It’s A Wrap!
While 2024 has generally been a great year for us at Infinite Frontiers creatively, it hasn’t been without some challenges. As we are now running four websites along with our YouTube channel our team is somewhat stretched in terms of what we are capable of doing. Several of our more recent additions to our team are dedicated to just one of our sites, leaving just a couple of us working on this website in between our somewhat hectic daily lives.
As we haven’t had convention updates to bring you for almost a decade now, this means that we need to focus more on reviews and articles, and this does place a greater strain on us creatively. While we have spent time continuing our retrospective episode reviews, we haven’t been able to do as many as we would have liked. We have been able to bring you more archive footage from the convention but not as much as we would have liked. One thing we have been able to achieve is the launch of a new social media account over on BlueSky where we’re posting and sharing content on a regular basis both from the site and new material.
YouTube Woes
One of the biggest disappointments for us has been our YouTube channel. While we had quite an active year in 2024 posting over 30 new videos, we’ve recently been hit with a strange anomaly. For some unknown reason, YouTube have been purging a significant number of channels (ours included) and removing a sizeable number of their subscribers and as part of that we have lost over 20% of our subscribers in the last week alone.
The damage – as you can imagine – is substantial and we don’t know how this will impact on the visibility of future videos. There’s been no explanation as to why this has happened. Has it simply been a case of dormant accounts being removed or just trimming bot subscriptions. We simply don’t know. However, we do ask that you spare a few minutes if you can to subscribe and check out the channel. There’s plenty of Transformers, retro and modern gaming, sci-fi, pro wrestling, and geek unboxing content and we’re sure you’ll find something to enjoy on there.
Working Smarter
One of the key things I want to try to do personally is take a new approach going into next year. As most of you know, as well as being the founder of our entire group, Infinite Frontiers, I take the lead across all four of our sites and our YouTube channel creatively. Frankly, that’s not an easy task at the best of times, especially as everything we do here is in our spare time!
I actually stopped working over a decade ago and I’m a full time carer for my wife so anything I do creatively is done to fit around everything else I do here at home. But spreading my time across five projects in between needing some time to myself to unwind isn’t easy so I’m aiming for a new approach for 2025.
While I obviously can’t find more time to work on our projects, my goal is to use the same amount of time better. If I’m going to do game reviews for YouTube for example (and I do want to look at video reviews of some of the Transformers games released over the years at some point), I’ll be writing scripts for several reviews at the same time, capturing footage in bulk and then recording the audio again in bulk. The reasoning behind this is that the latter needs to be done in a separate room and it’s a more effective use of time to record several at once and edit them as needed.
It’s the same for preparing artwork for content online. When I’m scanning images for any of our sites, I’m aiming for lengthy scanning / editing sessions and while it can be tedious doing one job for a few hours, it’s better than lots of shorter scanning sessions.
When it comes to written content, I’ll be taking this a step further. All of our sites have the facility for us to schedule content and if I do find myself in a position to write articles quickly, I’ll take advantage of the situation and plan content weeks ahead and simply schedule them, hopefully getting pieces ready well in advance of when they’re needed. As our readers, you won’t notice anything, but it should make our lives easier behind the scenes!
2025 – What’s Next?
So what are we planning for the next 12 months? Quite a lot, but here are a few of the highlights…
- New Videos -we’ll be working on a lot of fresh content for YouTube and diving back into our extensive 500Gb archive of footage from past Auto Assembly events!
- Reviews – we’re continuing with our plan to publish more reviews looking at Transformers video games and continuing our retrospective look at G1, Beast Wars and more. Going forward, we want to cover at least one episode a week.
- Articles – that’s been one of the quieter parts of the site for 2024 but we hope to be featuring a lot more going forward as we get ideas for original content.
- Your Submissions! – we’re always on the lookout for more people to get involved with the site, whether it’s articles, reviews, or even fan fiction so if you want to get involved, please send us an email using our contact form!
So all that said, we’re pretty excited about what the new year holds so stay tuned and if you’re not already doing so, don’t forget to follow us on all our social accounts, YouTube and subscribe to our newsletters for updates as new content goes live on the site!
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