The Brilliance of Niall Burns: Creating successful animation in the world of digital content creation

In the increasingly competitive landscape of animation, it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd. Niall Burns is an animator who has managed to make a name for himself through his continued excellence in this field. Burns' work has redefined the beloved visual style of Jacknjellify's award-winning animated web series, “Battle For Dream Island”, or “BFDI”. Through a combination of his limitless creativity and incredible technical skill, Burns has helped BFDI grow immensely in popularity, especially in India. Niall Burns' work for Jacknjellify's videos has amassed over 229,000,000 views across the globe, with 1,800,000 views in India alone.

Burns is responsible for bringing the characters to life through his uniquely smooth and fluid animation, prioritizing expressive and believable character acting while also keeping the animation loose and cartoony. Burns works closely with the other members of the BFDI team in order to ensure that the visuals for each episode come together perfectly. Niall Burns’ talents have been crucial to the evolution of BFDI’s charming visuals, which are largely responsible for the animated series’ success with audiences around the world.

The Jacknjellify team is made up of over 40 crew members consisting of audio engineers, video editors, voice actors, artists and animators. In 2018, Niall Burns was one of the very first animators hired to help reinvent BFDI, and he continues to raise the bar for what the series can accomplish visually as the series’ viewership increases at an incredible pace. Jacknjellify’s YouTube channel currently boasts 2.39 million subscribers and over 1.6 billion total channel views.

This year, Jacknjellify is unveiling two new BFDI episodes to theater audiences in six United States locations: New York City, Houston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and Fort Lauderdale. A whopping 15,000 tickets were sold for the screenings well in advance, with several locations at full capacity. Niall Burns’ animation is set to be featured on the big screen at three of these shows, evidencing his ability to captivate an audience even outside of the online world.

In 2021, Battle For Dream Island received the prestigious "Outstanding Web Series" award at that year’s Cartoon Crave Awards thanks to the support of online viewers who voted for the series to win. This achievement would not have been possible without the work of Niall Burns, whose work has accumulated over 87 million views on BFDI videos released in 2021 alone.

Recently, Jacknjellify has been reaching new demographics by releasing episodes of BFDI translated and dubbed into Spanish. Jacknjellify’s Spanish YouTube channel, “Jacknjellify en Español”, has collected over 702,000 subscribers and 156,000,000 total video views in under 2 years. In light of this success, Jacknjellify plans to expand their audience further by translating episodes into more languages, including Japanese, Portuguese and Hindi. 

Outside of his impact on the usual episodic BFDI videos, Niall Burns is also a driving force behind additional projects on Jacknjellify’s YouTube channel which have drawn millions of views. Burns’ ability to attract viewers through his animation is demonstrated in the popularity of “shorts” that feature his work. These shorts are small clips from BFDI episodes that have been repackaged as individual videos. The short-form videos featuring Niall Burns’ animation have accumulated over 24,000,000 and 3,000,000 views on YouTube Shorts and TikTok, respectively.

As Battle For Dream Island continues to entertain millions of fans in India and across the globe, Niall Burns cements his reputation as a standout lead animator in the field of web-based animated content. His unparalleled contributions to BFDI, slated for translation into Hindi, ensures the show’s reach will continue to grow within India’s animation scene.