Welcome to the contact page! Here you can ask me, site owner Joey Gainor, questions about the animated YouTube show Battle for Dream Island or give feedback on this website. I have been in the BFDI fandom since 2015 and strive to know everything about the show. Please check out the FAQ below before using the form.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How did the Huang twins get the idea for BFDI?
In the third grade, Cary thought the game Rock-Paper-Scissors was silly since rock and scissors both destroy their opponents, but all paper can do is "cover" the rock. He devised his own alternative, Water-Sponge-Fire, where all three moves are suitably destructive. Two years later, his school assigned him to make a fake catalog, and in it he turned Water-Sponge-Fire into comic characters Teardrop, Spongy and Firey, along with Woody and Match. Cary and Michael kept drawing comics and expanding the cast until they had 20 characters. BFDI's main precursor was Total Firey Island, a 16-book comic series with similar contests and ideas the twins recycled for BFDI.
- How long are BFDI episodes?
Episode length varies greatly depending on the season, from 6 minutes (S1E11) to one hour (S2E23), though only five episodes so far are over 40 minutes long. Generally, seasons 1, 2 (pre-hiatus) and 4 (pre-split) tend to have shorter episodes, and seasons 4 (post-split), 5 and 2 (post-hiatus) episodes tend to be longer. Season 3 only has one 11-minute episode.
- Why did season 2 end prematurely and then pick up again ten years later while season 5 was still running?
Season 2 (BFDIA) had production issues as early as episode 4. The Huang twins were making the show all by themselves while simultaneously in school, and come high school junior year, schoolwork became too busy for them to keep a monthly release schedule for BFDIA. BFDIA 6 was supposed to release on September 1, 2013, but since balancing the show and schoolwork was lowering the quality of both, the twins made the tough decision to postpone BFDIA indefinitely. Shortly afterward, their Google AdSense account was inexplicably terminated, further preventing them from continuing BFDIA. The hiatus lasted three years until Michael finally spoke up about the ban and their account was restored. Since BFDI's events take place in real time, the twins skipped the entire rest of season 2 and made the first episode of season 3 (IDFB) over the summer, but then school started again and they had to cancel IDFB too. Fast forward to 2023, when Jacknjellify is a thriving indie animation studio with many hired workers (see two questions below for more). During season 5's runtime, the crew teased something new coming on September 1, the tenth anniversary of BFDIA 6's originally planned release date. Most fans thought it would be IDFB 2 since season 4 implied BFDIA was cancelled in-universe... but it was BFDIA 6! The team soon revealed that they would make BFDIA a full-length season that fills up the three-year time gap and shows all the unseen events we saw the aftermath of in later seasons. The show still takes place in real time, except BFDIA's events are exactly ten years ago. Once BFDIA is done, the crew plans to finish IDFB and answer its mysteries.
- What caused season 4 to split?
Season 4 (BFB) was originally meant to be sloppily made to release episodes quickly with a 64-character cast, but over time, the episode quality and creative effort creeped higher and higher, so episodes took longer to make. The team was faced with a dilemma: the twins liked the lower-quality whimsy of season 1 and so did the fans, but the fans also wanted to see very high-quality animation with great storylines like the slowly-updating Inanimate Insanity II. Fulfilling both of those at once is impossible, so they had BFB 16 introduce a new host who convinced most of the contestants to switch to their new high-quality, slow-production season, BFDI:TPOT, while the rest stayed in post-split BFB, which had sloppier animation and more frequent uploads.
- When did the twins start hiring other people to make BFDI?
Before season 4, the Huang twins wrote, audio engineered, animated, and edited the episodes all by themselves, with only a couple characters voice acted by other people. In 2017, after their failed attempt at IDFB, Michael switched commitments from college to full-time BFDI production while Cary stayed in college to pursue STEM projects. During pre-split BFB, Cary's contributions were limited to writing and voice acting, while Michael and the twins' friend Satomi Hinatsu did the meat of the production. Throughout pre-split BFB, the team learned how to hire more animators and audio engineers and become Jacknjellify LLC. For post-split BFB, they held open auditions for faster production, caring less about quality consistency than TPOT, whose team remained with the most trusted and skilled workers.
- Who are the most important showrunners?
Besides Cary and Michael Huang, Satomi Hinatsu and Pokeysoda wrote for pre-split BFB and the first two episodes of TPOT. Satomi was promoted to showrunner at BFB 9, but after TPOT 1 and 2 took a year each to make, she was removed from the team due to "creative differences and efficiency problems." She wanted to make the rest of TPOT, but she admitted to being the reason the episodes took so long. Satomi and Pokey currently remain as voice actors. In post-split BFB, Sam Thornbury joined the Huang twins as a writer, eventually becoming the main writer for post-split and replacing Satomi as the main writer for TPOT 3+, occasionally assisted by Niall Burns, YellowAngiru, and short writer Florence Chappell. Similarly, Joseph Pak joined the twins in writing post-hiatus BFDIA mid-way through and became the season's main writer and director, with Anthony Acedo helping with episodes 9-16.
- Does Jacknjellify still accept recommended characters?
Yes. Recommended characters have previously been handled through YouTube comments (season 1), Google Moderator (pre-hiatus season 2), Reddit (season 3), and Patreon (season 4). Once the Jacknjellify Patreon ended, so did the ability to recommend characters, until Jacknjellify brought it back for post-hiatus season 2. Now, anyone can recommend a character for free through this form. Due to BFDI's huge fanbase, though, there's no guarantee that a given character will be drawn.
- Where do I buy BFDI merchandise?
Official merch is sold at shop.jacknjellify.com. The shop includes plushies, vinyl figurines, lamps, pins, jigsaw puzzles, books, and more. It also links to Spreadshop, which sells shirts and pins, and Redbubble, which sells a wide variety of items.
- Which object show content creators have the most YouTube subscribers?
The OSC Hot 100 website made by Cary has an automatically updating leaderboard of the largest object show YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, Jacknjellify is first with over 3,000,000 subscribers, followed by Jacknjellify en Español, AnimationEpic, Juki, carykh (another of Cary's channels), ChrisShwafer, Bonkers but Brilliant, WebzForevz, Riomations, and Humany (yet another of Cary's channels).
- What else did the Huang twins create?
Michael's YouTube channel features "How Made" videos showing the process behind some of BFDI's visual effects, and he once made an animation course on Graphy called Object Animator's Toolbox. The course was removed when Graphy underwent restructuring, but fans have archived it. Cary's channel carykh is host to his STEM and coding projects, such as evolution simulators, neural networks, Scrabble Tetris, and Chess on a Rubik's Cube. Some of these projects are hosted on htwins.net, which has been running since the twins were 11 years old. Cary's most famous personal project is The Scale of the Universe, which compares the sizes of everything from subatomic particles to everyday objects to galaxy clusters. Cary also hosts a YouTube elimination-based writing competition called Eleven Words of Wisdom, the sequel to Ten Words of Wisdom.