Millie Psi (Formerely titled "Sillie & Millie")

Hello, folks. It's been a while since my last post. Admittedly, this website of mine was in the far back of my mind. I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about Millie Psi, a long running project in my mind but has had abolsutely no work put into it.

This is a series that has had many iterations in my mind. It started as a two minute script alongside a character design that was made for a Nickelodeon pitch competition back in 2014. I have no idea what the result of that competition was but I can imagine it was far better than the crap I sent them. The idea was that Millie had this talking toy pony who would be a friend that she had to hide from everyone because... well I didn't really have a reason why, but I guess it was self-explanatory. Explaining how you're mates with an anthropomorphic toy horse would be pretty difficult. I then rediscovered the characters and resurrected them for my final year of university. At the time I was obsessed with the GBA game Mother 3 and wanted to recapture the feeling that game gave me but with Millie, so I wrote down on paper that she was a mentally broken child with a toy pony posessed by a wandering spirit be both a buddy at home and some emotional support.

That idea only existed on paper, though. The project I worked on didn't live up to that even slightly. It was not a good pilot. I love the work my storyboard artist and voice actors put into it but they were all at the mercy of an unfunny, untalented, inexperienced, and incredibly naive version of myself. I thought I could make a 7 minute pilot in under a year. Little did I realise what a severe undertaking that would be. The story of the pilot was that Millie was a dumb little girl who ate out-of-date jam (?) and felt sick for the whole day from it, and while her mother was out getting medicine, Millie would spend time playing with her pony doll possessed by a spirit (that was named "Sillie" at the time), while pretending she wasn't sick at all. Eventually it slips out that she's sick after all and Sillie opts to help her get better, and they look at the internet to find out how to make that happen quickly. She reads that you can eat spicy food to clear out your sinuses with, so she grabs her brother's (who never appears or is even mentioned once before this) tub of hot peppers (which is never brought up once in the story, just got pulled right out of my ass) and they happen to be the hottest peppers ever, Carolina Reapers. After eating them she feels even worse and her mum just happens to come home at that moment. Some time passes and the pilot ends. Honestly, I'm not even going into the ending because it's so horribly written that even recounting it in my mind gives me a stomach ulcer.

In case you can't tell, I utterly despise this pilot, and I understand the creator's perspective doesn't necessarily reflect the viewer's. This is an exception, however. I showed this to my colleagues and not one of them found it entertaining, and I can't blame them. I don't regret making it, however. Was it a good story? No. Was it a good pilot? No. Was it well-animated? No. Well-written? No. Funny? No. Did it represent how the story of the series I had in my head would have went? No. Did I have any time at all to improve the pilot in any way? No. Will I ever show it to anyone ever again? No. Why am I bringing it up, then? I don't know, I guess I'm feeling nostalgic for it, having just decided that I should really buckle down on the idea. The irony is that Nickelodeon, the studio I originally envisioned greenlighting this series, would eventually create a series called It's Pony, which is about a girl who has adventures with her pony friend to a similar scale (the difference being that her pony isn't a doll posessed by a spirit and it probably has a pilot that's 100 times better). So what happened to Sillie & Millie?

Let me tell you, ever since graduating, the story of Millie has underwent a lot of evolution. It's still an idea on paper but it's totally different now. I've decided just making it another cartoon sitcom for kids was a bad idea, and thought I could take Millie on a different scenario. Keeping up with the Mother/Earthbound influence, I thought, why not give Millie magic powers? That idea may have been the biggest change ever. She's still the same dumb little girl with depression, it's just that she now has psychic powers that she must use for good. What about Sillie? Well, honestly, I dropped the whole idea of him being a doll possessed by a spirit and just felt having the spirit on its own is not only simpler but more interesting. As for the name, well... I thought I was being really clever by having every characters' name rhyme with Millie. The pony was called "Sillie", her brother was named "Billy", and her mum was named "Jill" (not "Jillie", just Jill. Don't ask why I didn't just think of a different name), and every other character would fit that naming convention. It was cute but I hated the idea in the end. If anyone else wants to do that then you have my consent, by all means. Anyway, Sillie's new name, I think it's Dot now. It's what I've stuck with for the timebeing but it might change.

Changing Sillie's name obviously meant I had to change the name of the show and it was a lot simpler than you'd think to do that. I just kind of wrote down "Millie Psi" one day and I liked it so much that it's just stuck now. I think it would be memorable just for the fact that it's not immediately obvious how you'd pronounce it but once you hear it, it just rolls off the tongue. It's also just cute. This was about seven years ago now and since then I've even scribbled down a storyboard that I would honestly be proud to make into an animated pilot to pitch around. It needs tweaking, of course, but I like what I've made of it. Problem is, that's really all it is so far. Just ideas I've put on paper and never executed. That's why I'm here writing about Millie Psi. I want everyone reading to know that I want to execute this story in any way conceivable. I've thought about many ideas on how to execute it, from being married to the idea of it being a cartoon series to making it an RPG game, and right now I'm content with it being a web comic series. I have no idea how to make a web comic, though, so I would like to read a bunch of them and research their techniques.

This drawing shows her love for tossing sycamore seeds in the air and watching them twirl like tiny propellors.

I have posted many drawings of Millie, including this one, which is possibly the most recent one I've really been proud of, and in the past few years I've been constantly tweaking her design and thinking up more and more personality quirks for her. Her design has gotten less and less simple and more and more appealing. Now that I actually enjoy drawing her, and have an actual personality for the character, it's about time I actually get to work with exposing her to the world. There will be complications while doing so, that I plan to document at a later time, but for now I want to get to work already.