Former YouTube star Elle Mills found creative and personal balance in filmmaking

"There's a shelf life on social media," Elle Mills says, reflecting on her YouTube career and her pivot to directing.

After publicly sharing her burnout and later quitting YouTube altogether, Mills has now found fulfilment in filmmaking. In a recent interview with Q's Tom Power, the 26-year-old recalls her childhood dream of making videos for a living.

"I've been making videos ever since I was a little kid," Mills says. "Becoming a writer-director, making movies that were shown in theatres was just something that seemed too big to even dream [about]. But YouTube felt very homemade. And a lot of people my age, or just a little bit older than me, were finding success on it, so it felt a little bit more attainable."

Mills's videos combined a cinematic quality with a blend of humour, vulnerability and fast-paced editing. Many of them went viral, including one where she legally married her sister's boyfriend as part of a stunt. In another video, she hosted a slumber party for her brother and all his exes.

Her most-watched video is her coming-out video where she filmed her journey telling her friends and family that she is bisexual. The video helped her subscriber count soar from 15,000 to nearly a million in a few months.

While Mills says YouTube was a "therapeutic way of processing" her feelings, the rawness and vulnerability that made her successful also hurt her mental health. "I wasn't really bullied growing up, so it went from zero to 100," she tells Power. "I felt like I was really being put under a microscope."

Her viral video "Burnt Out At 19" sparked a larger conversation around mental health among YouTube creators.

Finding creative fulfilment while preserving her privacy

Around the same time she was questioning her relationship to content creation on YouTube, Mills wrote and directed her first short film, Reply, a queer teen movie that she crowdfunded and which was later acquired by Creator+.

"That was like the aha moment of like, 'Oh, there's a way for me to create that isn't at the expense of my privacy,'" she explains. "Me being behind the camera, there's still such creative fulfilment from that, and that was what I was searching for this entire time."

While Mills is outspoken about the mental health impact of a career in content creation, she's proud of what she's accomplished. "I love who I've become through that journey," she says. "I think I needed to go through that. I'm also very grateful for the opportunities that that has given me…. I get funding for films because of the work I've done on YouTube, and I have a community of people who are interested in seeing new work from me."

Her next short film is set for production in December. "I'm still in a weird transitory phase of my career, but I feel good about the direction I'm heading," she adds.

The full interview with Elle Mills is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Elle Mills produced by Vanessa Nigro.