Michael Huang is an American YouTuber, voice actor and animator who, along with his twin brother Cary, is best known for creating the animated web series Battle for Dream Island (BFDI) on the channel jacknjellify. He had previously helped his brother in publishing on the internet the interactive online visualization tool, The Scale of the Universe. He has an inactive personal channel called fernozzle and hosts BFDI music on the channel YOYLECAKE Michael.
Early Life
Michael Huang and his brother Cary attended Camino Pablo Elementary. In 2010, when they were in the ninth grade, Cary made an interactive online visualization tool, The Scale of the Universe. Michael helped his brother put it on the internet, following which the twins attracted media attention. Their creation was featured on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and inspired the Kurzgesagt app "Universe in a Nutshell". Michael went on to attend San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema in 2021-23 before transferring to University of California, Berkeley, from where he is scheduled to graduate in 2025 with a degree in Film, Cinema and Video Studies.
Career
Michael and Cary Huang had joined YouTube with the joint channel jacknjellify back on February 4, 2008 and started uploading videos with The BeiBei Squisher days later. Both of them were interested in computer programming and animation, and went on to make several animated videos for the next couple years. On January 1, 2010, they premiered the animated web series Battle for Dream Island on the channel. The series, co-created and produced by both the twins, featured 20 anthropomorphic inanimate objects (like flower, rock, pen, eraser, coin, etc), in a fictional place called Goiky, participating in a reality television style competition against each other to decide who gets into the Dream Island. The first series lasted for 25 episodes and ended in a last-man-standing battle.
The first-of-a-kind “object show”, the series was very popular and has gained a cult following, also spawning more such series like Inanimate Insanity, produced by Adamation on the AnimationEpic YouTube channel. Despite several gaps and hiatuses, Battle for Dream Island has been running successfully for five seasons, with the latest being Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two, which started in January 2021 and currently has nine episodes. A new sixth season has been mentioned several times, but has not been confirmed. Apart from the Huang twins, others who have worked on the long-running series include Satomi Hinatsu, Kenzie Bryant, Emily Pitcher, Niall Burns, Sam Thornbury and Griffin Weber.
In January 2023, a Spanish-language channel for jacknjellify was officially launched through Unilingo. Other than the joint channel, Michael has a personal channel called fernozzle, which was created on July 15, 2011, the same day his brother created his personal channel, carykh. He and his brother also created the online web portal htwins.net in 2008 to host their games and videos.
Family Life
Michael Yiming Huang is younger by two minutes than his twin brother Cary. He often stylizes his name as Michæl.
