Unfortunately, “Homemade Hero” did not make the cut of the top 15 films in the National Film Challenge. We’re still technically eligible for a “best in genre” award, as there were no “superhero” movies in the final 15, but we’re out of the running for both the grand prize and the audience award.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I want to be a good sport and offer my sincerest congratulations to those teams that did make the cut (and I do mean that). But on the other, having now watched most of the films in question, in several cases I have to say WTF? Our film is so much better than some of them. And not just in any one respect (creativity, originality, performances, technical execution, etc.), but across the board. Don’t get me wrong — there are some decent offerings, but nothing that makes me think our film didn’t absolutely belong in that group.

I suspect that’s just the nature of distributed judging — with any one judge seeing only a few films, it’s hard to develop any sense of comparison. This is basically what happened with the Project Greenlight script judging — you wind up with judges who can only compare an entry with the other entries they’ve received, without any way to judge how they compare with the bulk of the films in competition.

But in the end, we didn’t make this to win a prize (no, really). I think we made a damn good movie, and I’m still just as proud of it as I was before.

“Homemade Hero” is still available for online viewing at the main site, and the NFC films can be seen in their screening room. Give them a look, and let me know what you think.

And in the meantime, we’ll get cracking on our next planned short, “Some Kind of Hero”...