Burnie Burns, born as Michael Justin Burns, is the CEO of RoosterTeeth and the creator of Red v. Blue and Lazer Team, along with other projects created under RoosterTeeth. Burnie was born in New York, but has lived most of his life in Austin, Texas, where RoosterTeeth is currently located.

In his early life, he went to Alief Elsik High School, where he got the nickname “Burnie.” It was given to him by a classmate who wanted to differentiate him between the other Michael’s in his class. He then went on to go to The University of Texas at Austin. Here, he started working on the campus TV station. While he was there, he started a new TV program Sneak Peak, which is the longest running student television show at The University of Texas at Austin.

While attending school, he was working at a tech company where he met future co-founders of RoosterTeeth, Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola. As they started working together, they started to develop a new, game changing video-game based videos. The videos were called Red v. Blue. They used a technique called machinima, which means to take pre-recorded game play from a video game and dub audio over top to make create a story.  When they first used this technique, it was widely disregarded, and nobody really paid any attention to the series. After they got recognition from Computer Gaming World, the series became so popular, that they had to revise their original thought of only making these short, comedic videos to a full season length, consisting of 20 episodes or so per season.

Because of the popularity they were getting, the decided to make their own website, properly named redvblue.com. Their domain name has since changed to RoosterTeeth.com, because after Red v. Blue, their company grew beyond their imaginations. Over the course of the next couple of years, they went on to make more machinima content, like The Strangerhood and PANICS. These shows made their popularity grow even more, so Burnie had to grow his company.

Presently, they have made a lot of great content. To name some, Immersion, where they take video game situations and try to replicate them in real life, RWBY, being a very popular anime show, and The RoosterTeeth Podcast, where his co-founder, Gus Sorola, hosts a podcast every week and has guests through out the company talk about recent events and popular topics.

Because of them, they have inspired me to pursue the Communication Media field so i can one day hopefully work for them. To hear their story, to have them come up from nothing and create such a successful company, who has produced a Blockbuster movie called Lazer Team, it has motivated me to learn all i can about production and editing.

Have you ever heard of these guys? Do you love them as much as i do? Let me know in the comments below about what you think!