Stutzman grew up in Ohio and graduated from Anderson University in 1992 with degrees in Computer Science and Marketing.
The three then moved to Los Angeles, where Stutzman took on an editing job for the Game Show Network, while they looked for funding for new projects [1] Sue Bea Montgomery, who had served as an associate producer on Chillicothe, introduced the three to entrepreneur and inventor Maurice Kanbar, who had invested in their film.
Though Kanbar expressed disinterest in the live-action projects that they pitched to him, he grew excited after seeing Wobots, an animated short film that Cory had made, and proposed the idea of making an animated feature that put a twist on a familiar fairy tale.
The brothers came up with the idea of telling Little Red Riding Hood as a police investigation, and Kanbar agreed to fully finance the film, before they had even shown him a finished script.
It was one of the first computer-animated films to be fully independently funded,[4][5] and due to its small budget, its animation was produced in Manila, Philippines.