The breakthrough software of Flint, Michigan native Kerry Conran took 10 years to develop, allowing Conran very little time to leave his Sherman Oaks, California apartment, where he did most of the work. As he put, his research question was: "Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?" Conran took his first stab at the concept while a student at the CalArts live-action filmmaking school, where he labored to fuse animation with live action in his film project called "That Darn Bear." Conran was mired deep in the project when "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" was announced, a picture many times more sophisticated than anything he could do at the time. Demoralized, he abandoned "That Darn Bear" after three years, calling his experience "a deep, gaping wound." Retreating to his apartment, Conran subsisted on tech-support jobs, but kept an eye on technological developments, quickly realizing that it would soon be possible to develop high end movies on a lowly home computer. Using his trusty Macintosh IIci, he experimented in building images of robots on his computer. Given the technology at the time, each robot leg took 12 hours to render (and there were 20 robots). Despite his progress, Conran appeared destined for irrelevance if it were not for a fortunate encounter with a friend of his brother's wife, Marsha Oglesby, a movie producer. After viewing Conran's unfinished short, she was blown away and quickly arranged for financing with the help of her boss, Jon Avnet of Brooklyn Films. Almost overnight, Conran went from obscurity to being the director of a major Hollywood film.