A Professor Said to Scrap Their Pilot—Then It Got Into SXSW

I was scrolling TikTok recently when I came across a filmmaking account. The user had posted some unfavorable feedback they’d gotten from a professor about their pilot. The professor said, bluntly, “It doesn’t work for me.” They went on, “The characters are one-dimensional, paper-thin,” adding, “If it was absolutely hysterical, that might be all right.”

The next image was a response from the filmmaking team, a year later: “Thanks, we actually just got accepted into SXSW, but I’ll definitely keep this in mind.”

The creators are Wade and Wes McElhaney, and their pilot, Codependent, is their first project out of film school. It was fully crowdfunded. This is what happens when two screenwriters trust their weird, specific, personal idea and don't let gatekeeping kill it.

I knew No Film School had to get in touch to learn more about how they did it. Ahead of SXSW, we Zoomed with the duo.

Codependent Courtesy of Wade and Wes McElhaney

What Can You Pull From?

The McElhaneys are twins, and the characters are based on themselves (another reason that feedback stung a little more). Their idea started somewhere completely different—a sci-fi twin mystery—before they stripped it back to something they could actually produce.

“And then we're like, ‘Okay, wait, we actually want to make this, and that is probably not the most ideal thing that we're going to be able to make ourselves,’” Wade said.

The pivot wasn't a defeat. It was the smartest creative decision they made, because they wanted to create something they could feasibly crowdfund and accomplish.

They also understood that being a twin is a unique perspective they could play to.

"A lot of twin stuff is schticky and feels not based on the actual twin perspective,” Wes said. “So we're like, ‘Oh, we feel like we have a unique take on this.’"

Your specific lived experience is a competitive advantage, not a limitation.

Write Real People, Use Real Places

Specificity is both a craft tool and a production strategy. Every character in Codependent is pulled from life. Wade said his writing process starts with picturing a specific real person first.

"A lot of characters I write, especially in this type of based-in-reality story, I think of a person, and I just write them."

The female lead, Riley Sigler as Jane, is their real best friend from high school. They wrote the part knowing they'd ask her. The pilot also features some specific settings, like the garage bedroom split down the middle.

"That garage, the wall splitting the two beds, that's literally where we were sleeping for a year and a half,” Wes said. “That was our actual parents' garage."

And the restaurant networking scene came from a real moment that mortified Wade. An exec asked to give him her number. It was for rewards points at the restaurant, but he thought it was to connect as professionals. That's in the pilot now. (Everything can go into the creative toolbox, even if it’s embarrassing.)

Their production strategy followed the same logic. They used their parents' house, called in favors, and only paid for two locations. Micro-budget show producers, take note.

Codependent Courtesy of Wade and Wes McElhaney

Bring in an Outside Eye

Sometimes you get really close to the writing and don’t know where the blank spots are or what doesn’t make sense. It’s important to know what you can't see in your own work.

As twins with nearly identical perspectives who were also starring in the pilot, they knew they were too close to the material to direct it themselves. They needed someone who'd see it fresh.

They brought in director Caitlyn Phu, a Chapman classmate whose music video work they'd been following.

“She helped so much with elevating things, definitely,” Wade said.

She punched up jokes on set and helped calibrate the tone for an audience beyond themselves. She brought in comps that made it clear she understood their vision. That comp conversation is the key detail here. If your director can tell you exactly what your project feels like and it matches what you intended, you've found the right collaborator.

@themactwinss

@SXSW believes in us… bitter college professors, take notes! #sxsw

The Professor Email (And How to Take Notes)

I had to bring up that feedback email because it’s just so relatable to most creatives. It turns out the professor was a former teacher whose opinion they sought out, and that was the response they got. The tone threw them off.

Wes said, “So at first, obviously, we're like, ‘Oh my God, what? Is he okay?’ We were just like, ‘Why is he so mad, first of all?’”

It was helpful to them to imagine the situation as something they might get from a typical exec.

Wade said, “With the email, we were like, ‘You know what? Let's picture this guy as an executive, and sure, maybe people will have these opinions.’”

It can be hard to receive feedback that is so blunt it reads like a blanket dismissal, with no constructive ideas included. Just, “I don’t like this.” But it will likely happen to all of us at one point.

"He said, 'You should scrap the whole thing and change the whole idea,'" Wade said.

"And he said something about it being insulting to raise money for something like this," Wes added.

You have to learn to separate useful notes from bad ones, and definitely don't scrap your weird idea just because someone doesn't get it.

Wade's first instinct was not to respond at all. Instead of either crumbling or dismissing the feedback entirely, they did something more useful. They sorted it.

"The things he was saying weren't, I don't think a lot of it was valid, but I think the core... we were like, ‘Maybe there are some things we could punch up,’" Wes said.

They identified the one area with a grain of truth (not enough conflict) and used it to strengthen the pilot. Everything else they let go.

Wes said, "It's so important to understand which notes you should take … there's something special about your perspective, and whatever is deep inside, it's what is going to make the script different."

Wade added, "We got into SXSW."

SXSW and What's Next

What did we learn? Make the thing, then let it find its people. Not everyone will like it, and that’s okay.

"This was literally the first project we made outside of film school … fully crowdfunded, super micro budget, no production company backing,” Wes said.

Wade added, "When you take this kind of unconventional art, you doubt yourself so hard sometimes, but then you finally get some outside recognition."

They want a full season. They crowdfunded the pilot and know that model doesn't scale to eight episodes, so SXSW is the pitch. They’re going to keep fighting for their projects, and you should too.

Be sure to check out the rest of our SXSW 2026 coverage!