American technologist
Bran Ferren (born January 16, 1953) is an American technologist, artist, architectural designer, vehicle designer, engineer, lighting and sound designer, visual effects artist, scientist, lecturer, photographer, entrepreneur, and inventor. Ferren is the former President of Research and Development of Walt Disney Imagineering as well as founder of Associates &amp; Ferren, a multidisciplinary engineering and design firm acquired in 1993 by Disney. He is Chief Creative Officer of Applied Minds, which he co-founded in 2000 with Danny Hillis. Apple's "pinch-to-zoom" patent, which features prominently in its legal battle with Samsung, was invalidated by the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2013 based on a 2005 patent by Ferren and Hillis for multi-touch gestures.
Early life.
Bran Ferren was the only child of artists John Ferren and Rae Tonkel Ferren. He grew up surrounded by art, artists, and technology. His father, whose work is part of the permanent collections of many American art museums, mixed with painters including Picasso, Miró, and Mondrian before becoming an integral member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. His father was also personal friends with Alfred Hitchcock and created paintings for "The Trouble with Harry" and designed the nightmare sequence in "Vertigo". Ferren's uncles came from the worlds of engineering and technology: Roy Ferren served as director of flight test for North American Aviation (later North American Rockwell) and worked on the B-25 Mitchell bomber, X-15 rocket plane, XB-70 Valkyrie, and B-1 Lancer bombers. Stanley Tonkel was a noted senior recording engineer for Columbia Records, who engineered recordings for artists such as Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan.
He first attended Hunter College Elementary School for gifted students in New York City, followed by a year at the American Community School, in Beirut Lebanon (1963-1964) while his father served as the first artist-in-residence for a U.S. Department of State cultural exchange program to introduce American abstract art to the Middle East. After returning from overseas, he spent three years at the McBurney School in New York City, and then the last three years of high school at East Hampton High School, in East Hampton, New York.
Ferren started his first design and engineering company, Synchronetics while in high school. He left high school at age 16 to attend MIT, but departed in 1970 to continue entrepreneurial pursuits. Despite his short stay at MIT, he was invited back by then school president Charles M. Vest to be a keynote speaker for MIT Technology Day 1996. Before his 21st birthday, Ferren had worked on TV commercials, films, and regional theater. He had also pioneered visual effects for arena concerts for groups such as Emerson, Lake &amp; Palmer, Laurie Anderson, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, David Bowie, Paul McCartney. R.E.M., Depeche Mode, and Foreigner, using pyrotechnics, audio, projection, and novel lighting techniques.
Career.
Associates &amp; Ferren.
Ferren founded Associates &amp; Ferren at the age of 25 to do work at the "crossroads of design and science and entertainment." One of the first projects was for Broadway play "The Crucifer of Blood", a Sherlock Holmes mystery that starred Glenn Close and won Ferren a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award. The production featured a "shattering display of thunder and lightning", which got the attention of director Ken Russell, leading to Ferren's first prominent assignment as special visual effects director on a major Hollywood science-fiction film, "Altered States".
He is a theater designer whose work has been seen on Broadway and London West End stages, Australia, and in touring productions world-wide. He has designed the Special Effects and Sound for several Broadway shows, and is a long-term member of the Broadway stagehands union, IATSE Local #1. His theatrical special effects and sound design work for the Broadway productions of "Frankenstein", "Cats", and "Sunday in the Park with George", were widely acknowledged for their groundbreaking special effects. Frank Rich said in his "The New York Times" review of "Sunday in the Park with George": "What Mr. Lapine, his designers and the special-effects wizard Bran Ferren have arranged is simply gorgeous." It was the first Broadway musical to utilize digitally-processed projection mapping (pre-processed, geometrically corrected 35mm film projection), a radio-controlled costume with a robotic endoskeleton, 20 kW xenon rotating-dichroic-filter light ray effects, and dazzling high powered lasers that broke the 4th wall, traveling throughout the audience. Frank Rich said of his work in "Frankenstein", "Bran Ferren's special audio-visual effects are also impressive by theatrical standards" and Carol Lawson, said in "The New York Times" that "critics have remarked that Mr. Ferren's work on this play, which included the spectacular destruction of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory by his monster, had the lavishness that audiences have come to expect in films, but have never before seen in the theater."
As principal designer of Associates &amp; Ferren, Ferren went on to lead many high-profile projects, such as special effects for the Paul McCartney World Tour, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd, and visual effects for "Little Shop of Horrors". He was a technical consultant for the films "Impostor" and "Fat Man and Little Boy", and designed the titles for "Simon, Dirty Rotten" "Scoundrels", "Guilty as Sin", and "Little Shop of Horrors". In addition to special effects, they were considered leaders in advanced projection, simulation and laser effects technology, and provided customized equipment for dozens of major road tours, and stationary installations.
He also produced, directed, and was the cinematographer for the movie "Funny" (released in 1992), which received a Nomination for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and nomination for Best Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, Gold Jury prize at the Houston International Film Festival (now called WorldFest Houston), and was featured in the Toronto International Film Festival Midnight Madness program, and at the Cleveland International Film Festival. "Funny" features over 100 individuals, from Dick Cavett to Frank Zappa, telling their favorite jokes on camera. It was distributed by Warner New Media, in LaserDisc and CD-ROM.
Ferren served as lead designer, engineer, and producer of the 50-state, 16-month tour of the Bill of Rights, which celebrated the document's bicentennial. For the tour, he designed and built the Bill of Rights Secure Transit Vehicle, which transported the fragile parchment document, as well as a 15,000-square-foot traveling exhibit equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, A/V, security, and safety systems. He was the chief designer for the award-winning Columbus Center Hall of Exploration, a science discovery center, located at Baltimore's Inner Harbor in 1997.
In addition to their work in the entertainment sector, Associates &amp; Ferren was responsible for developing many technologies for industrial and government customers in the areas of robotics, sound systems, vehicle systems, control systems, scientific research &amp; experiment design, optical systems, and 3D machine vision, as well as moving lighting fixtures for Strand Lighting Inc. Mr. Ferren was responsible for the development of advanced lens and thin-film dichroic coating technologies for the Revo Sunglasses brand, and served in the role of Director of Research &amp; Development for Revo, which established new performance standards for sunglasses including the first to incorporate Infrared blocking. He did the lighting design and interiors concept for Ian Schrager's "White" variation of Studio 54 in NYC, as well as invented the what is believed to be the first multi-monitor video wall, which premiered at the opening of the Palladium Club, also in New York City, in 1985.
He has been recognized for his unique approach working with directors in the design of special effects and visual effects across motion pictures, television, theater, concerts, and later in theme parks and architecture. This was featured in a "New York Times" profile on him by Stephen Farber, when Paul Mazursky's film "Tempest" (1982) was released. In this article, Farber quotes Mazursky as saying he is "a Renaissance man, a figure from another time ... If you crossed Robert Oppenheimer and Monty Woolley, you might get Bran."
By the time Disney acquired Associates &amp; Ferren in 1993, Ferren and the company had won an Academy Award for Science and Engineering as well as two Academy Awards for Technical Achievement. Ferren was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects for "Little Shop of Horrors", and received a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nomination for special visual effects. He is a voting member of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars), and the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences (Emmys).
His entertainment industry projects at Associates &amp; Ferren include:
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The Walt Disney Company.
Ferren led the Disney Imagineering R&amp;D group as senior vice president, then executive vice president, eventually becoming president of R&amp;D and Creative Technology for Disney, and head of technology for the company for 10 years. According to his former boss, CEO Michael Eisner, Ferren's mission was "to dream about the future and show us new and innovative ways to tell stories". Starting in 1993, he was the first corporate executive to receive the now-common job title of "Creative Technology", indicating responsibility for both creative and technical domains. When Eisner interviewed him on his new talk show, "Conversations with Michael Eisner", he said that he loved that Bran "pushed me against the wall, and pushed management" in the areas of creativity and technology. The idea to create the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, and its name (derived from Ferren's title at Disney), originated from discussions with US Army leadership (four-star general Paul J. Kern) on how to gain access to Hollywood entertainment industry expertise in high-technology areas such as computer-based Modeling &amp; Simulation, and Virtual Reality.
Ferren supported Disney's Strategic Planning Group and had direct creative and technical involvement in a wide variety of design and technology projects for Disney Theme Parks, such as the Tower of Terror ride, the Test Track by General Motors, the Indiana Jones Adventure, the Virtual Reality Animation Studio, and many prime time television projects. He has had a 30+ year creative history collaborating with top senior ABC network director Roger Goodman, with dozens of news, sports, and entertainment division projects. His team was responsible for engineering the ABC Times Square Studios armored electronic-dimming soundproof window systems, robotic cameras, large on-air displays, and a massive curved LED ticker display.
In 1996, Ferren created the Disney Fellows Program which attracted some of the brightest minds in computer science, including Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, and Seymour Papert, as well as astronaut Story Musgrave. The first Disney fellow was parallel-computing pioneer Hillis with whom Ferren went on to found technology innovation and design firm Applied Minds in 2000. Applied Minds is now headquartered in Burbank, California, a few miles from Imagineering headquarters. In 1997 Ferren and the Disney fellows were profiled in a major article in "The New Yorker", by David Remnick, and in many other publications and news service including Bloomberg, and Newsweek.
In the 1990s, Ferren's research group at Disney developed many pioneering concepts, and produced demonstrations of these ideas and technologies, to familiarize Disney corporate leadership of their potential to transform the entertainment industry. These included gaming box platforms, personal navigators, electronic books, theater-scale digital cinema, direct on-demand music and video delivery to the home via telephone networks (pre World Wide Web &amp; broadband), interactive cable television, safe browsing concepts for kids, and hybrid on-line/theme park concepts.
While at Disney, Ferren developed a unique test for screening design &amp; engineering talent, when he found that traditional Disney process of resume screening, reviewing bios, and interviews often did not identify the kinds of multi-domain savvy talent he needed at Walt Disney Imagineering Research &amp; Development. Known as the Yellow Box Test, it asks the candidate to go through 100 or so items in the box, all selected for their uniqueness and interest. As featured in a 2003 article in "Discover" magazine, they are scored on not just how well they can correctly identify the items, but also their thoughtfulness in explaining how they would be used and why, material selection, sourcing, cost, viable alternatives, and the technical and design principles, and even aesthetics. The candidate is also evaluated subjectively as to their enjoyment of the process, speed, enthusiasm, thoughtfulness, and appreciation of technology. For example, do they elect to first start with the things they understand, or those they do not.
Applied Minds.
Ferren's company Applied Minds L.L.C. (AMI) has been described as a "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" for geeks. AMI invents, designs, prototypes, and creates high-technology products, vehicles, architectural designs, and services for government institutions