Dan Hefner

Daniel Winston Hefner was born on December 16, 1969 at 5:25 pm. in Lynwood, California. Two minutes later, his parents Tom Hefner and Leah Hefner, were shocked to discover that they were having identical twins, with the arrival of his brother, David Lee Hefner! When Dan was four years old, his parents were fed up with the big city life, so they moved... to the rural rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. During the long rainy seasons, Dan began drawing, writing, and watching countless hours of classic and now classic "scripted" television shows. With his brother, the thirteen year olds collaborated on writing and illustrating several children's "Choose Your Own Adventure" style books. They soon formed their production company, "Hefner Bros. Productions" and converted their shared bedroom into a recording studio. In this makeshift studio, they produced and created audio taped stories complete with sound effects - replicating the radio plays of the Golden Era! Around age 14, they pooled their allowance together along with their earnings from their Landscaping business to purchase a used Super 8mm film camera from a local garage sale. As film stock was expensive and difficult to attain, these low budget films forced the self-taught boys to stretch their creativity and skills. Being an identical twin was an asset, as they both would act in their own films. Many times doubling as the same actors, which allowed them to share tasks Directing, and being Cameraman. In high school, Dan took every Television Production, Electronics, and Computer Programming class offered. He soon found an interest in computers. With his passion of videogames, he focused on computer interactive entertainment. By the mid 1980s he had created and programmed several videogames. Dan had an early vision of combining his two passions- films and videogames, thus becoming an early pioneer of Hollywood merging with the computer industry. This led to his next project, a pre-Toy Story (1995) fully CGI animated short film in the late 1980s. It was during this period that Dan was heavily into research and development- programming computerized speech with randomizations and artificial intelligence. After graduating from high school, he immediately attended L.H. Bates, the best Vocational Technical Institute for Television Broadcast and Production on the west coast. While learning quickly, and still a student, he became an instructor at the institute. After graduating with a diploma, he relocated to Boise, Idaho for work, where by age 21 became Operations Supervisor of Fox Television affiliate KTRV. After working there for 7 years to the day, he resigned from his position, and moved to California to rejoin with his twin brother, David. He freelanced with him for a while doing production work, until he decided to pursue more steady work in the field of Feature Film and Television Post Production. Becoming an early adopter of High Definition Video, he has worked for several of the leading Post Production facilities in Hollywood.