Dear students,

It has come to my attention that some of the people who win free tickets to advance screenings on our site here are taking advantage of the situation. This is so not cool. Let me explain:

Recently, we’ve been using a website to make getting free advance passes faster and easier for everybody. For example: 400 people enter a contest and 50 winners are picked at random.

Those 50 winners are emailed that they’ve won two passes and told to go to a website. Each movie has its own Scene-Stealers promotional code. You put in the code and your name is entered as having picked up your tickets. You print off your passes and bring them to the screening. Awesome!

This rules because we didn’t have to mail anything and you didn’t have to wait for your passes!

The problem is this: Apparently some people aren’t happy with their two free passes. For tonight’s screening of “Terminator Salvation,” for example, there are three winners who printed off more than their allotted passes for the show. This takes away those passes which were already reserved for someone else.

So, let’s imagine this: You enter. You get an email from me saying you’ve won. You go to the site to print off tickets and they are all gone. That’s what happened to some winners that emailed me this morning. Lame.

Here’s the kicker: I know who you are. We get a list of the names of people who have reserved our winning tickets, and we can match them up with the names of users who actually used the Scene-Stealers code.

If you’re one of these people, don’t do this again. It really screws things up for us, and you’re just gypping other people who were randomly picked just like you. Isn’t two seats enough? If you are one of those people, please return to the site (Gofobo.com) and release those tickets so that somebody else who won can claim them.

I’m going to keep this post up as a reference so I don’t have to keep reminding everybody, but this is a little embarrassing. I feel like I’m rapping someone’s knuckles with a ruler like my old music teacher from 2nd grade. If we tell you you’ve won two tickets, be happy with that! You get to see a movie before its released, and it’s free! Isn’t that enough?

Sincerely,

Mr. Melin

We’re working on taking care of those who legitimately won tickets from us, so if you have any problems, email me at eric@scene-stealers.com.

Tags: advance, free, get, Giveaways, greedy, not cool, passes, scene-stealers, tickets, winners

To showcase how freaking cool our sitegoers are, we decided to do something different for our “Star Trek” screening contest. We asked you to send in your own homemade “Star Trek”-related videos to win tickets to the IMAX advance screening on May 6 in Kansas City. The only stipulations were that entries mentioned “Star Trek” and Scene-Stealers, and that they kept it PG-13, like the movie. One entrant, who you’ll be able to find on Page 2, took that last one particularly to heart.

We got a lot of great submissions. Congratulations to all of you! Each and every person who submitted a video has won free tickets to the IMAX screening and will receive some cool “Star Trek” memorabilia at the show. In addition, we will hold the first and second place winners’ seats in the theater, so they don’t have to get there two hours early like everyone else! Those of you who entered the drawing for tickets without submitting a video will be emailed today and notified that your passes are in the mail.

Part of the fun of doing this contest is showcasing everybody’s efforts on the site, so without further ado, here are the winners and runners-up of the Scene-Stealers 2009 “Star Trek” Contest. Great job, everybody!

The winning entry was from Trey Hock, and is a bizarre public service announcement for the Vulcan Adoption Alliance. It’s short, but it’s very funny and worth watching more than once, because it leaves you more than a little confused. Like any PSA, the acting and editing is both a little suspect. Perfect.

The second-place entry came from Hai Nguyen. Hai won gift certificates to Paisano’s Ristorante and Pachamama’s restaurant in Lawrence, KS. He made an animated video for an actual Leonard Nimoy recording of “If I Had a Hammer” that’s eerily up to date, asking the important question: “Is MC Hammer responsible for swine flu?”

RUNNERS-UP (and more to follow on next page!)

All of the other submissions get free tickets to the screening as well. Here’s one particularly funny video created by Seth Iliff and starring Trey Hock. It’s a spoof of the “Star Trek” teaser trailer where Chris Pine, as Captain Kirk, drives up to the camera purposefully on a motorcycle. Seth’s character has a different, although equally noble purpose.

Theresa Kester filmed a funny quickie video about an excited father that is apparently “based on a true story.”

There’s more where these came from.

Tags: 2009, early, giveaway, IMAX, j.j. abrams, kansas city, pack, prize, scene-stealers, screening, Star Trek, submitted, user, video

Here are some more of the winning videos from our 2009 “Star Trek” screening contest. Congrats again to the winners, and to everyone else—enjoy!

Johnathan M. Reeves put together a cool “Star Trek” tribute that uses the classic theme song and superimposes the old and new actors in the series over the top of it:

Andrew Tomb shot a self-described “awful film” for the contest, but I thought it was really funny. It may not have any budget to speak of and the actors may be reading their lines from a computer, but Andrew is the only entrant who decided to push the envelope and go PG-13 with his language.

David Fike’s video is all about how awesome Captain James T. Kirk and the rest of “Star Trek” history is. It also has some very funny inter-titles. Check it:

Nick Colby showed how easy it is to make a crappy-ass video by doing some quick impressions of popular “Star Trek” characters and filming it on a cell phone camera:

Amber Sisco interspersed her “History of Star Trek” video with memorable quotes from the movie and TV series’ characters:

Christopher Swanson may be the biggest “Star Trek” fan out of everybody. He wrote this about his epic tribute film: “Throughout its 40+ year history, Star Trek has celebrated the hope of humanity. This video is a celebration of that hope!” It looks like he’s going to be making the drive from Springfield, MO to KC for Wednesday night’s screening! Congrats to Christopher and everyone else who submitted a winning video.

Tags: 2009, early, giveaway, IMAX, j.j. abrams, kansas city, pack, prize, scene-stealers, screening, Star Trek, submitted, user, video

This giveaway should be fun. We’re giving everyone advance notice on this because it involves shooting video!

We have 50 ‘admit-two’ passes to see the Kansas City advance screening of J.J. Abrams’ reboot of “Star Trek” in glorious IMAX on May 6, 2009 at AMC Barrywoods (8101 Roanridge Rd.) at 7:30 pm. We also have one very cool “Star Trek” prize pack (including prizes to be named at a later date!). But we’re doing things a little different this time at the request of Paramount Pictures, who know that we have the coolest movie freaks on the Internet.

We want you to make a video.

It can be anything you want, as long as it has something to do with “Star Trek.”

Upload it to any user-based video site and send me the link, your name, and your address at eric@scene-stealers.com.

Some ideas to get you started:

- Recreate a favorite scene from any incarnation of the TV show or movies using yourself, friends, animation, action figures, whatever!
- Do an impression of any familiar “Star Trek” character.
- Speak Klingon.
- Describe why you deserve the prize/tickets more than anyone else.
- Create a mash-up using clips. You DON’T have to appear on camera

Rules:

- Just so we know that you’ve made this video specifically for this contest, make sure that Scene-Stealers is mentioned either out loud or onscreen in your entry and also in your text description of the video.
- Videos cannot be more than 5 minutes in length.
- Let’s keep the raunchiness to a minimum. We’re talking PG-13 here, just like the movie.
- Remember: “Star Trek” and “Scene-Stealers” in one video!

I will pick the winner personally. I’m looking for a video with that intangible “Star Trekiness.” Quality doesn’t matter. Use your cell phone (or someone else’s) if that’s all you got! Funny is always good too. The best videos will be posted on the site!

The winner (whether he/she is from Kansas City or not) will win the “Star Trek” prize pack. If the winner is local and can attend the KC screening on 5/6 at AMC Barrywoods, they get VIP passes to the screening as well. We have VIP reserved seats for 2 other runners up. The other 47 winners will be chosen at random, starting with the people who made videos.

You may enter with the form below if you’re not going to make a video and hope that less than 50 other “Star Trek” fans make them.

All entries must be received by Thurs. April 30 at noon CST. We’ll post winners on Friday May 1.

Good luck. Live long and prosper!

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Tags: early, giveaway, IMAX, j.j. abrams, kansas city, pack, prize, scene-stealers, screening, Star Trek

As we’ve mentioned ad nauseam recently, Scene-Stealers is heading to Austin, TX for the SXSW Interactive/Film Festival on Friday. We are spreading the word about the upcoming redesign, which will allow you to become a Scene-Stealer.
Want your voice to be heard? We’ll be doing alpha teasting next week when we get home. If you want to test out the features of the new site before anyone else, email me at eric@scene-stealers.com and we’ll put you at the top of the list. If you’re in Austin, be sure to stop by Red 7 on Sunday night and say “hi” at our Bacon-Flavored Party.

Tags: 2.0, films, media, movie fans unite, movies, preview, redesign, scene-stealers, social networking, teaser, trailer, you be the movie critic

We are hard at work on the 2.0 version of Scene-Stealers and this teaser is just one of the videos you can see at SXSW on Sunday, March 15 at the Red 7 at our insane Bacon-Flavored Interactive Party. Spread the word! Tell all the obsessive movie people you know that they’ll have a place to go soon!

Tags: 2.0, films, media, movie fans unite, movies, preview, redesign, scene-stealers, social networking, teaser, trailer, you be the movie critic

As you may have heard we are undergoing a pretty radical transformation here at Scene-Stealers.com. In order to make this a website where movie freaks can express their opinions freely about new and old movies alike, we need to have a badass movie database. And that is a LOT of work. What we want to do is provide you with the kind of database that reflects what YOU want. What makes you happy when you go to bed at night?

So I have some questions for all of you regular sitegoers out there. What it is about current movie databases that you love? What helpful features so they have? What kind of categories would you like movies to be grouped by?

On the other side of things, what really sucks about the ones you’ve seen? What are their limitations? What drives you crazy about them?

Examples to look at would be IMDb, RottenTomatoes, Netflix, and ComingSoon. Specific examples for features would be: classifying movies by genre (or something more specific), designating lead and supporting cast, aggregating a rating system, featuring trailers, having a site-wide Top 10 organized by genre, etc.

We are amassing as much information as we can about movies right now, but when this thing starts next March, it’s still going to be pretty small. It will be up to you, the Scene-Stealers, to correct and add important/cool info as you see fit. It will very much be a flexible wiki-style thing. If you have some extra time and want to get in on the ground floor with this project, email me at eric@scene-stealers.com. If you want to upload some of your favorite movies and the info you find important about them, let us know!This will be your site and the more personal it is to your tastes, the better! This will also give you the jumpstart on everyone else so you can be involved with Beta testing.

Please leave your comments below, and email me if you want to help out! Scene-Stealers 3.0 launches next year!!

Tags: database, help, launch, movie, new, scene-stealers, website

First off, Dustin and I want to thank everyone for who donated any of their time and/or money to the Scene-Stealers.com “Night of Rock n Roll Horror” event last Wednesday night at the Screenland Theater in downtown Kansas City. Everybody had a great time, and almost everybody went home with some kind of badass prize. Most importantly, we also raised a lot of cash for the Children’s Music Fund.

As you can tell from the photo on the right, sitegoer Lindsay Parker was pretty excited to win the 32GB iPod touch, and she wasn’t alone. Scene-Stealers Top 10 author Tony Sams kicked everyone’s ass in the horror trivia game (despite answering “Kazaam” to one of the questions he didn’t know), walking away with a full-sized autographed “Grindhouse” poster.

We played Rock Band (apparently, I don’t know as many of the words to Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” as I thought I did, and I certainly can’t sing in tune), did some “Thriller” Jacko zombie dance moves, and drank the Screenland’s special of the night–an actual drink called the Trick or Treat that contained vodka, triple sec, amaretto, and orange juice.

We watched original 80s trailers for “This is Spinal Tap,” “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Say Anything,” and “Breakin’.” It was a pretty nice score to have the four original fake trailers from last year’s “Grindhouse,” especially since three of them are not available on the two DVDs they wrongly split that movie into. But I have to say…the trailer for “Theodore Rex,” starring Whoopi Goldberg and a giant animatronic farting dinosaur was pretty spectacular.

Our feature presentation, “Trick or Treat,” in my mind, held up pretty well as a really fun B-movie in a campy sort of way. It was a lot funnier then I remembered, and the Scene-Stealers crowd yelled out their fair share of punchlines. “Don’t play that tape, it’ll blow your bra off!” from the girl in the front row was one of my favorites.

Anyway, thanks again to Transmuto, Spiral16, the Screenland Theater, and all our sponsors for a great night. Here’s a link to more pictures from the event.

Tags: benefit, children's, fund, horror, music, n, night, of, rock, roll, scene-stealers