Daniel Winston Hefner was born on December 16, 1969, at 5:25 pm, in Lynwood, California, to parents Tom Hefner and Leah Hefner. Only two minutes later, his identical twin brother, David Lee Hefner, was born, surprising his parents.
When Dan was four years old, his family moved from the "big city life" to the rural rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. During the long, rainy seasons, Dan began drawing, writing, and watching classic television shows. He and his brother collaborated on writing and illustrating children's books and graphic novels, forming their production company, Hefner Bros. Productions, and converting their bedroom into a recording studio.
Around age 14, they purchased a Super 8mm film camera from a local garage sale and began producing low-budget films, which forced them to be creative and resourceful. As identical twins, they could act in their own films, doubling as the same actors, and share tasks such as directing and camera operation.
In high school, Dan took every Television Production, Electronics, and Computer Programming class offered and developed an interest in computers. He focused on computer-interactive entertainment and created several videogames. By the mid-1980s, he had an early vision of combining his passions for films and videogames, becoming an early pioneer of Hollywood merging with the computer industry.
Dan's next project was a pre-Toy Story (1995) fully CGI animated short film in the late 1980s. During this period, he was heavily involved in research and development, programming computerized speech with randomizations and Artificial Intelligence.
After graduating from high school, Dan attended L.H. Bates Vocational Technical Institute, one of the west coast's best schools for Television Broadcast and Production. While still a student, he became an instructor at the institute. After graduating with a diploma, he relocated to Boise, Idaho, for work, where he became Operations Supervisor of Fox Television affiliate KTRV by age 21.
After working at KTRV for seven years, Dan resigned and moved to California to rejoin his twin brother, David. He freelanced with him for a while, doing production work, until he decided to pursue a more reliable steady line of work in the field of Feature Film and Television Post Production.
