101. Bran Ferren, Former President of R&D at the Walt Disney Company

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One of my favorite aspects of this podcast is learning about how attractions really work. The technical hurdles to make them function properly every time are massive, especially for new technologies. That makes it so interesting to talk with the brilliant thinkers working to make dreams a reality. Bran Ferren is a perfect example. During his 10 years at Disney, Ferren looked towards the future with attractions and a lot more that pushed the limits of technology.

Ferren is my guest on this episode of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. During the show, we talk about challenges in creating attractions like The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Test Track during the 1990s. As the president of Research and Development for the Walt Disney Company, Ferren’s work goes beyond attractions and looks to the future of the industry.

Beyond work at Disney, Ferren started multiple companies, owns hundreds of patents, and served clients in a variety of industries. As the chief creative officer and co-founder of Applied Minds, Ferren speaks regularly at conferences and other events. His background with engineering and art makes him the perfect person to shine at Walt Disney Imagineering.

Show Notes: Bran Ferren

Watch Bran Ferren’s TED Talk, “To create for the ages, let’s combine art and engineering”, from March 18, 2014.

Check out the BBC documentary Shoot for the Moon, which features Bran Ferren and Space Mountain in Paris.

Transcript

Bran Ferren: Well, a key job of Imagineering is to continuously provide breakthroughs that differentiate Disney attractions, and whether that’s creatively or whether it’s technically or whether it’s conceptually of just what’s a different way to tell stories and entertain people. So that’s actually what’s so exciting about Imagineering is the ability to constantly be pushing these things in new directions.

Dan Heaton: That was Bran Ferren, former President of Research and Technology at the Walt Disney Company, and you’re listening to the Tomorrow Society Podcast.

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Dan Heaton: Thanks so much for joining me here on Episode 101 of the Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. I hope you’re all doing well, being safe and healthy. I’m really excited about this podcast today with Bran Ferren. I really got interested in him. I was watching the documentary Shoot for the Moon last summer, which covers Space Mountain at Disneyland Paris, how that was created; it was a BBC TV documentary. Tim Delaney was the focus, but Bran was a key participant at the time. He was working in creative technology for Disney and I was like, who is this guy?

Because he talked so differently than your typical Imagineers. He was a thinker and talked in a way that I knew there was a lot more there to his story, and the more I looked into it, I was stunned by just how much he’s done in his career. He started multiple companies, he holds hundreds of patents. He’s done the visual effects for films like Altered States and Little Shop of Horrors and Star Trek V, done effects for concerts and Broadway shows, and it’s been a lot more than just the entertainment field.

He’s currently the Chief Creative Officer at Applied Minds, and they do work for a wide range of clients, including the government and industry if you’re interested. After this conversation, he does a really good TED Talk that explains his view and so many other speeches at symposiums and is a real thinker who’s on the cutting edge of technology and what’s happening in that realm, and it made him a perfect person to be involved with the research and development at Disney.

He worked at Disney for about 10 years after Disney acquired his company, Ferren and Associates, and worked on some really big projects. We talk in this podcast about the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Test Track and Indiana Jones, and also beyond the specific attractions really just has an interesting view on how Imagineering works and then beyond what’s going on with the future of technology. It was really cool to talk with them. The way he explains how they solved problems with the Tower of Terror and Test Track is fascinating on its own and there’s a lot more to it than that. This hour flew by and I can’t wait for you to hear it. So here is Bran Ferren.

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Dan Heaton: I have so many things to ask you. You’ve had such an interesting career, but I want to start when you were younger, I know you’ve talked before about how you grew up as a family of both artists and engineers with your parents and then with uncles. So how much do you think that impacted where you ended up just kind of growing up in that environment?

Bran Ferren: Well, I think it was invaluable. I mean, my parents were smart, talented artists. My dad was an abstract expressionist, my mom an impressionist painter, and so I grew up around art. The house was filled with it. The friends of my parents were artists. We traveled around the world going to museums, looking at the wonders of the world, and so for me, art was like oxygen. It wasn’t something special or decorative. It was a different language and way of communicating and certainly contributed vastly to my worldview.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, so obviously the fact that you ended up working for Disney, but then even some of your own businesses that stem from that, but you ultimately were pursuing a career also engineering. So what made you kind of decide to go into that field rather than just straight up art?

Bran Ferren: Well, I was always equally interested in both, and it’s only school that says you have to get serious and decide if you want to be an artist or an engineer. You actually can be both. You don’t have to decide and you’re not violating international law if you practice one while you’re interested in another. I came from a family, both of my uncles were engineers. My uncle Roy on my dad’s side was director of flight test for North American Aviation. Then Rockwell, he worked on the X15 rocket plane, the XB 70 Valkyrie and a collection of fascinating aircraft as director of flight test. My other uncle, uncle Stanley on my mom’s side, he was one of the senior recording engineers at Columbia Records. And if you look at his discography, it was Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand and Bob Dylan.

I remember he actually said when he did Bob Dylan’s first album, I remember him saying, the kid will never make it. So I guess picking talent was his strength, but making them sound great was, and so again, for me both were fascinating. My grandfather from a very young age was an inspiration. He used to, well, he helped invent the postwar sheet metal kitchen cabinet that proliferated with the housing boom and ran the shop himself and did the tooling and design. And so the family has always been infused with both sides. My father actually had a great deal of interest in technology and in fact patented a type of sculpture he developed, which was based upon reflected light, which I was amused to see has been used as examples in computer graphics classes for techniques such as radios.

So the bottom line is I always found both fascinating. I think the instinct was not to do what my parents did, just as many kids. And so from my perspective, combining those worlds was always my interest. So it was never my plan to be a normal engineer, but I found engineering physics, how the world and universe works to be integral to how I think about my art.

Dan Heaton: You can see that throughout your career. I feel like you’ve had both that, I wouldn’t even just say a combination, but all of that mixed together in an interesting way. So you ultimately started your first company Synchronetics when you were still in high school in the late 1960s. So what drove you to get started so quickly at a time when a lot of people might not have been starting their own companies and are just thinking about typical high school things?

Bran Ferren: Well, I think it started with I never liked school or much of anything about it. And so at the afterschool time when I was working, whether it was doing sound and lighting for local bands or working in theater, summer, stock theater. So for me, school was kind of this annoying thing I had to do, which distracted me from doing the things I wanted to do. From my perspective, it’s always been a, I guess people would call the extracurricular world was always to me the world and school was just something they made you do. And so while there were classes I enjoyed and friendships and people, I enjoyed all of that other series of activities and theater and film and learning about lighting, that’s where my real interest was.

So I started companies, Synchronetics was the first one with the intent that that’s what I was going to do, and I made money by fixing people’s radios and hi-fis and televisions or helping do installations of technology or working in the theater, worked later on television commercials and helping out in filming and production.

So that was always part of my life and the idea of a company was not, oh, let’s go start a company. But the idea was I’m doing these things and the company was a vehicle to be an entity to be able to do them. When you’re a kid and you’re looking for literature and information, keep in mind this was before the internet, so if you wanted to know what a company made, you had to get them to send you a brochure, and if you’re going to start a technical library, it helped to sound like you were real rather than a kid. So the company started as being that vehicle to facilitate learning and acquiring knowledge, and I learned much more from that set of exercises than I did from school.

Dan Heaton: You mentioned too movies and entertainment and when your next company, Associates & Farren, you did a lot of work for films like Altered States or concerts like Depeche Mode and REM and Broadway and so much more. So what’s kind of attracted you when you were doing that to work in the entertainment field and kind of supporting that side of it with your businesses?

Bran Ferren: Well, I was always fascinated by art and whether that art is performance art and theater or whether it’s painting and whether it’s capturing reality or whether it’s surrealism or abstraction, that whole world is what really fascinated me. So I think I naturally evolved into areas where you got to be a participant rather than an observer and then gravitated to being a creator rather than just a participant.

Dan Heaton: So on a related note, I’m curious too, because I know ultimately you started doing projects for Disney when you were at Associates & Ferren, but I’d love to know too just before that, did you have much interest in what Disney was doing or even the parks when you were growing up and when you were younger?

Bran Ferren: Well, I was never a theme park fan, and we didn’t go to theme parks with my parents. I mean, our choice was go to Paris or go to Beirut, Lebanon, or go somewhere else. And my parents were typical starving artists and we lived well. So what I mean by that is we never had a lot of money. My father was not able to earn a living just by his art, even though he is in a significant number of the major art museums in the world.

And so that interesting paradox of what it takes to be a professional artist. So he supplemented his income by teaching. He was chairman of the art department at Queens College in New York and Cooper Union before that, the family circle, we didn’t do theme parks, we did real thing is the wrong word, but we did experiences traveling around the world.

When I got older and I visited theme parks like Disneyland and Disney World, I was really fascinated at how well it was done and how exciting that experience was and the ability, I mean it’s virtual reality. It’s just virtual reality created out of bricks, mortar, and atoms rather than out of bits. No difference. Difference between a theme park and an amusement park is there’s a story thread. So that tied right into my interest in storytelling.

And so what theme parks did was combine technology, visual design, storytelling, all into one set of, for lack of a better word, enchanted worlds. That was fascinating to me and I thought I was very impressed at how well Disney did it. And then of course at the same time, every time I’d see an effect or see something else, the question is how could you do that better or make it more effective?

Understanding that one of the challenges is if you do an effect in the rock and roll business or in theater or in film, it just has to work once in so many of these other domains. It’s either once or for the duration of a show or for you name it, but in the park business, it has to work every few minutes for 25 years. And so it was interesting to me seeing the compromises that had to be made to make things stable, reliable, safe in ways that you don’t have to do in the same way when you’re doing effects that are directly supervised by professionals. I found it a really fascinating world and really admired that. So my discovery of the theme park environment in general and Disney in specific actually came much later. It didn’t happen as part of the family experience growing up.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s interesting because in a way you didn’t have that, I wouldn’t say emotional connection, but that approach that many had where it was always just kind of a core part of it, but I still feel like what they did in Imagineering and how they created these parks really relates to what you’ve talked about so far in terms of your background. So I’d love to know how did you ultimately, I know you did some projects for Disney before they ultimately acquired your company, so how did you get connected working for them and actually, or how did they hire your company to do some projects with them?

Bran Ferren: Well, it actually started through my friend Jim Henson. Jim and I were friends, we were introduced to each other by a director and writer, wonderfully talented guy, Marshall Brickman, years ago and got to know each other, got to be friends. I helped him out thinking about how they might be doing themed attractions and other sorts of events. So I was part of multiple brainstorming sessions with him through quirks of fate.

We ended up being in a situation where his company was being acquired by Disney and he actually recommended to Frank Wells at the time that they should also acquire us because we were playing a useful role in what they were doing and had a set of capabilities that Jim thought would be great for Disney. Turns out I knew Frank from several years before because he was head of Warner’s when I was doing a film called Altered States, which is my first big Hollywood movie, Ken Russell film, which is a lot of fun.

I was the visual effects designer director for that. And so it all sort of came together. That was my introduction, went out to see them. I met at that time Michael Eisner, who I had not met before. We got along, well, we started doing projects together. I was working both with corporate with Frank and Michael as well as with Imagineering. After doing a variety of projects for probably a year and a half, I had a little company.

We were 60, 70 people and they became a big portion of our business, and that was a good thing, but it also meant if they pulled the plug, I’d be in trouble. I was developing both technology and strategy for the Walt Disney Company. So about, again, I think it was about 18 months in, Michael Eisner said, look, I think we need either a more permanent or a less permanent relationship. You’re really becoming core to how we think about things. I said, look, I feel the same way. So that resulted in then acquiring the company. I went along with the office furniture and was based out of Imagineering.

Dan Heaton: Well, that’s really interesting that it makes sense given your history with the movie business that you would have connections with Frank Wells and even with Jim Henson who was really involved with Disney and unfortunately would’ve probably done a lot more things with them in the future in the parks. There were some really interesting things there. So I’m curious too, for you being someone who started companies and then ultimately became a part of Disney as a leader and Imagineering and like you mentioned with corporate, what was that transition like for you to then move to work for Disney? Was it very similar to what you were doing or was there kind of a big change as you moved into that role?

Bran Ferren: Well, I mean it’s interesting because I’d never actually worked for anyone. So that was interesting to have an actual job, but it’s hard to get too annoyed at people who treat you well, pay you a lot of money, and let you do whatever you want. So it was not like having a wisdom tooth extracted without medications. It was a great company, great environment, lots of talent at Imagineering and throughout the whole company. So it was fun to participate.

I knew a significant number of the people I ended up working with because again, I’d been working with them by the time the acquisition was done two, two and a half years. So it was really not flipping a light switch, it was really just a progression of what had happened. Then it was important to me that as part of the acquisition, the people who worked for Associates & Ferren were looked after, all had jobs, had a secure position, were able to relocate to California if they chose to, etc.

Dan Heaton: I was watching a documentary recently that you were in briefly Shoot for the Moon, which is about Space Mountain in Paris. You described Imagineering as a bunch of wackos who invent the future of theme parks, which I like that quote a lot. So I was wondering what was the atmosphere like? That was in the 1990s when Michael Eisner and Frank Wells in the early ‘90s were in charge and there were just so many projects. It was such a period of growth for that company. What was that atmosphere kind of being part of that huge period of growth that they had there?

Bran Ferren: Well, to me, that would be called normal because I wasn’t there at any other period. It was very interesting that when Frank came in, Frank was asked to run the company and Frank said, I really shouldn’t be running the company. You should have Michael Eisner run the company. I’ll run it with him. That was a terrific partnership because they were incredibly sympathetic with each other. They were resonant. Everyone knew you couldn’t go to one and then go around to the other. So the whole dynamic of it worked really, really well, and they each contributed in really significant ways.

So it was not like it really was two equals, but with the understanding that Michael was there to make the key creative decisions and that it was Frank’s responsibility to put in place the mechanisms and execute those. But again, these were both very smart, strong, thoughtful people. The level of activity and expansion was of them coming in and taking Disney, which was in a state of decline, realizing where the value was, maximizing that value and causing enormous expansion in a whole variety of different areas. So it was a very exciting time to be involved, but again, it was the only time I was involved, so that to me just seemed like normal.

Dan Heaton: And I think given how things have gone since that they’ve never really stopped growing basically. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what it was like to work with Michael Eisner. I know he references you in his book that he wrote in the late nineties about how you were a dreamer about the future. I’m curious because there’s been so much written and said about him, what was your experience like just interacting with him on various projects,

Bran Ferren: Smart, thoughtful, good opinions? If you needed an idea, you’d get quick answers. So I thought he was terrific to work with. We got along very well, still do. Incidentally, we’ve remained friends and from my perspective, it was a pleasure to be able to help. So he had a series of visions.

My job was to help extend those visions and look into the future for Disney, and at the same time, from a daily operations point of view, make sure we had a steady stream of new creative ideas that kept us differentiated in the marketplace. On top, I mean the challenge about being the leader in a field is you don’t have the ability to look to your left and right and copy what other people are doing. You have to lead well, that perfect environment for me. Michael was always fascinated and interested in new ideas.

He would come by and visit my R&D group, corporate R&D group on literally every month or two, and he was eagerly engaged and interested in what these new ideas could do to create new ways of telling stories and to be able to put that in a context that extended the entire Disney franchise and whether that was theme park or broadcast television or any of the other directions, cruise ships and such.

And I think Michael was certainly between Michael and Frank because on a certain level while I was there, most of them were very tightly connected, were just terrific to work with, smart, thoughtful, and at the same time, I think they provided a very good balance between what are the larger corporate issues that one needs to address, as well as how do we direct specific activities like creation of a new theme park and such, which are obviously major financial commitments. So getting crisp and concise answers that let you go your job and to be able to bring them new ideas and know that they were open for those inputs and welcome those inputs was a great environment.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean I think about whether it’s with the theme parks with some of the attractions and parks that we’re at it, or even with some of the big corporate moves like acquiring A, B, C, or whatnot that Michael, I mean the company just changed so much. I’d love to ask you a little bit about a few of the big attractions that I believe you’re involved with. I know it’s been a while since they actually happened, but I’d love to get a little bit of your memories from that.

One of them is the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, which I know which opened in ‘94 and in a sense was kind of goes back to the old drop towers, but obviously is very different given some of the technical challenges there. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about just that experience and kind of how to make that kind of tricky elevator really function.

Bran Ferren: Well, the history of it actually goes back a little bit pre elevator. So I was asked to get involved in it by Marty Sklar and Mickey Steinberg and take a look because they loved this concept of Tower of Terror, Twilight Zone, Rod Serling, etc., which again, over time fewer people know what it is, but that was a time where this was still clear in everybody’s mind as to what that franchise meant. The problem was it was not closing, the budget was not closing.

It was from a technical feasibility point of view, challenging. It was based upon a custom ride system that had been designed, which again, the budget was nowhere near being ready to be green-lighted. So I was asked, go take a look at it, see where we are, and let’s see if we’ve got a way to get this back on track and affordable so that it has a chance of being presented to corporate to get green lit.

I took a look at it and it was at that time a very complex new ride system so that it was not about elevators, but the idea is you were going to simulate the notion of the elevators by a continuous ride system that took you up, dropped, you did all those other things. What I did was call for a reexamination and a reset and let’s look at this and explore actually using elevators. And we had partners such as Otis Elevator, which was part of United Technologies, a Disney sponsor.

I remember going to their boardroom and presenting this idea of we wanted to use elevators and our show ride group, which is great, had put together a series of concepts based upon autonomous with a guided vehicle that would be a module that people sit on. So an untracked vehicle, which was new to the theme park business at that time, to the best of my knowledge, had not been used that follows a predetermined path, would again load onto low-speed elevators, two of them, and a high-speed elevator.

So that’s times two. Two low speed would feed a high speed just again so that the ride volume balanced out and this vehicle would go into the low speed elevators, it would be able to transition in and out of the floors. It would then load into a high speed elevator where it would be secured in place, do the drop and then take them off to consider that. So that was the concept we collectively developed. Show Ride did the engineering and feasibility concepts for it all looked like it would work and bring the budget down to a point that was sensible. A series of meetings such as, well, where do we get motors that have the torque, the power and the positioning we need? Turns out for gold mines and such, there are these giant motors that have been built by Otis and there are elevators.

We went to see them and I remember describing the experience how people are going to drop and the look in their corporate boardroom was a little bit of a deer in the headlights because their representative said, Mr. Farren, what you’re asking us to do is what we’ve spent the past a hundred years making sure never happens. So I knew that was going to be a little challenging.

And it turns out actually we went to, if I recall correctly, General Electric because the Otis traction motors were not going to be able to do the job. So we had all of those systems, new generations of controls, IGBT based motor controllers, which were new at the time. This was all put together into an integrated system design. Again, Show Ride did a terrific job of pulling all of that together and the engineering with a whole collection of very novel systems.

Ultimately the budget did work, so it was presented and approved and that became the attraction that you saw. But again, it’s a big team effort with everyone involved. Our job in R&D and creative technology was to, in this project help look at recouping it, move in a new direction so that the overall enterprise was able to get something that from a ride performance budget perspective, fund perspective was going to meet Disney standards, which are very high. At the same time, it was interesting to note that it was one of the first software defined ride systems, meaning the acceleration profiles and stuff were definable and programmable such that you could do refreshes and renew ride experiences.

That was novel for theme park experiences, which typically it is a ride which is designed to do one specific set of things, do it very well over and over again, rather than provide significant opportunities for reprogramming. By significant, I mean enough of a difference and a change that from a global perspective, from the perspective of guests are sufficiently new experience that are enabled by these programmable modes that you can advertise it, promote, and get people to come back to experience this new experience.

Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean I think about the first version that I went on, you dropped once and now all the differences where you’re going up and down and different things. It’s interesting to think about how that was put in place early on because it does extend the life of it. I mean, I feel like it doesn’t feel like an attraction that’s 26 plus years old. It feels fairly new regardless of the Twilight Zone connection like you mentioned. But basically it still feels a lot more modern than some things that were done more recently, which is a testament to what you did originally.

Bran Ferren: Yeah, well I said, well, again, team effort, not me. And the interesting thing about it was as with many of these things, we put that capability in from day one, but it actually took time and to go through a cycle to creatively explore what one could do with it and good news is that turned out to be a valuable capability.

Dan Heaton: Oh, definitely. Yeah, that makes sense that originally you didn’t know exactly what it would be, but each step forward was something it was capable of doing.

Bran Ferren: Exactly. I mean the analogy would be a general purpose computer that you can use for word processing, you can use for graphics, you can use for email. The platform when it’s designed is designed to give a series of capabilities and the software or the apps which are ad later allow you to expand those. This is similar, although there was an initial show which was designed and thoughtfully produced. The notion was this gives you the flexibility to be able to enhance that later.

Dan Heaton: Right, definitely. I want to also ask you about Test Track because again, it’s been in place for a while, but I know especially given the time to get it together that it was a challenging project in terms of the vehicles and how they were being moved through that attraction. I’d love to hear you talk a bit about what you did on Test Track and how that came together.

Bran Ferren: Test Track started from the General Motors sponsorship contract was coming to an end at Epcot. These go in multiple year cycles. So the question was is General Motors going to renew and reup or not? General Motors was not in good shape financially at the time this was happening, which was unfortunate.

So there was a great deal of concern of one, will they continue as a sponsor or would we have to find a new sponsor or the attraction too, given their economic situation, what are they going to be able to afford to do? So there had been some teams that were put together to look at a variety of approaches such as a new pre-show, perhaps a film piece, do a collection of interesting at incremental prices, upgrades to it, designed to renew it and refresh it, but not a new attraction. The sense was this was all they’re going to go with.

So I had asked Marty, well, how about if I put together a team and let’s see if we can come up with something fundamentally new, understanding that it’s a long shot, but we can let the other things then be the plan B and plan C if they can’t afford plan A. We had talked about what are themes and ideas and the idea of a Test Track came up and it was actually interesting because it occurred to me and Marty was saying this would be interesting to people.

I agreed, I did a bit of research on GM test tracks and was actually very pleasantly surprised at how extensive their testing is, hot weather testing, cold weather testing, crash testing, all the things that you knew about, but the details of how they did acoustics, how they did a variety of things. And I went out and visited several of their test tracks and one of them, it was interesting because they had a vehicle dynamic test pad known as the Black Lake, big piece of asphalt, quite big, and you can drive around and zoom around on this and they can wet it.

They made a statement, well, you can’t, without hitting an object or doing that, there’s no driving maneuver you can do that will cause a GM car to roll over. And I said, really? That’s interesting. I’d never really thought about that. Can I try it? And they said yes. So I was out there driving around like a maniac and in fact, I did not find a way to roll the car over. And so when I came back I said, I think this is an interesting story.

Why don’t we put together something that would capture that spirit and give people behind the scenes? And so a creative team was put together. I led the initial efforts on exploring it. I pulled together a collection of the people writers such as Kevin Rafferty and collections of people that I had grown to really have respect for and enjoy at Imagineering.

We put together a plan for a test track. We decided we would be bold in ways such as go outside the building; we wanted to take people at a hundred miles per hour, actually let them see backstage, which as you know is never done. And my point was, if they’re spending their time looking backstage, we’re doing something wrong with this ride system, they should be holding on for dear life and crash test vehicles and give that entire experience in a Disney attraction.

We wanted to do things like put real crash test vehicles with crash test dummies in them. And there was constant pushback. They’ll never pay for this. You can’t go backstage. There’s no ride vehicle system that’s capable of doing this. You can’t show the public crash test vehicles. It’s morbid and it will scare them, etc., etc., etc. So we as we usually do at Imagineering ignored all of the guidance that put together this experience with real.

What you see is pretty much what the original design was. Again, Show Ride developed a unique set of vehicles using electric drive and power casters. Active roller coasters were really not done at that time. A typical rollercoaster, you drop it and gravity takes you to where you need to be. This was the opposite. It was powered and could speed up and slow down and do a whole variety of other things, new challenges and safety engineering as to how you do that and maintain positive safety control. But that came together, but we put together the usual Disney quality presentation to illuminate it.

We had done a whole variety of testing. Show Ride built a very nice little go-kart vehicle of the same size to give a feel of what we like. And we took Michael Eisner, he and I were in this vehicle closing down traffic and zooming down Grand Central on the Imagineering campus to say, yeah, that seems like it’s going to be pretty exciting.

Again, make a long story short, or perhaps it’s a little late for that. I brought the group, did the pitch to the board of directors at General Motors making the bet that these were car guys and gals and would get into the excitement of this. Rather than the pitches that every one of their lawyers was saying, we have to be talking about safety and this and that said, well, how about talking about how much fun it is to drive and that thrill and that experience and that pride of ownership and what went into making your GM car and we’ll wrap the safety message.

And all around that, make a long story short, they said yes, do it not much to everyone’s pleasant surprise and shows you the power of positive thinking. The net result was what you see as GM test track. And the only things that from a legal perspective ended up was dropping the speed limit to 65 miles per hour because they said we’re not going to go faster than the speed limit. So there you have it.

Dan Heaton: That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that before about the speed limit because you said a hundred and I thought maybe it was just Disney saying we can’t have our guests because they don’t have as many thrill rides. This isn’t like a park with tons of roller coasters that they didn’t want to go a hundred, but it still packs a punch.

Bran Ferren: The number a hundred came from nothing other than me saying, gee, a hundred seems like a nice number. So there was no thoughtful engineering design. It just seems like a nice number. And so from a practical point of view, when you look at what would be the difference in engineering and life and tire wear and other things to go into a hundred, I’m sure it was a perfectly sensible decision beyond saying, let’s not break the speed limit to go at the speeds we travel at. But when you’re in the conceptual design phase, you want to throw something up in the air and see if it sticks. And a hundred seem to me like a good number.

Dan Heaton:Oh, definitely. Well, I want to make sure we ask about one more attraction, which speaking of vehicles, it has a really unique vehicle, which is the Indiana Jones Adventure, which has its enhanced motion vehicle that makes you feel like it’s doing a lot different things than the vehicle is actually doing, and I think makes the story great. So can you talk a bit about what you did on that project and what that experience was like?

Bran Ferren: Yeah, well, Indiana Jones, which again as you know is a great theme park attraction, and I was not part of the core design team on that. That at all happened. I was asked to come in later and help enhance it when we are test and adjust and putting it together, the sense of sound, some of the visual effects and such could use a little help.

So I was simply called in to help with that effort. So again, it existed from a design perspective before I was there. The unique contribution of that was the idea of taking a powered roller coaster wheeled motion and putting a motion base on top of a four wheel platform so that you could add and enhance vehicle dynamics. Really great idea. The concept story was of course a great one. So many iconographic images such as the rolling ball and such.

So that that was all done at the time that I arrived. And then we just were looking at, well, is this rolling ball scary enough? So let’s see if we can add significant infrasound to make your bones shake a little while you’re going through that passageway. Again, it was a touch up and that sort of thing through the attraction, but it was great to be part of it. It was excellent team of people, and I think it did actually a great job of creating an Indiana Jones like experience because the film was so vivid and fresh in everybody’s mind, it set a high mark of achievement. So it was fun just to be part of helping to execute that.

Dan Heaton: Oh yeah, I mean that attraction, like I mentioned with the others, again, it’s one of those that holds up so well now and was ahead of its time technologically. So it’s great that you got to at least play a small role in that.

Bran Ferren: Well, a key job of Imagineering is to continuously provide breakthroughs that differentiate Disney attractions, and whether that’s creatively or whether it’s technically or whether it’s conceptually of just what’s a different way to tell stories and entertain people. So that’s actually what’s so exciting about Imagineering is the ability to constantly be pushing these things in new directions. And unlike consumer products where you have to make very large volumes of things at a low competitive price there, you’re creating worlds. So you actually have, even though it always feels like the budgets are tight, no matter where you work, you have the flexibility to be able to create fundamentally new ride systems, fundamentally new visualization imaging systems and such so that it enables you to push the creative boundaries in ways that don’t happen if you are limited to off-the-shelf technology.

Dan Heaton: And that raises an interesting question that I have for you. Having worked for Disney and seeing the leadership side too is I found some of my favorite attractions. They’re almost like you kind of referenced giving you something you didn’t realize you needed or it’s a technology that you haven’t experienced before. But there’s obviously, like you’ve referenced with budgets that can be a risk because it costs a lot of money to make these attractions. So we’re seeing a lot of reliance on existing properties and such things that are a little bit safer, which can lead to great attractions, but it can vary. Disney’s such a large corporation, and this could even be beyond just theme parks. How could a corporation of that size do something unique when there’s so much risk involved too? How do they balance that, at least from your experience?

Bran Ferren: Well, you have to be doing unique and new things or else you go out of business. So it’s not hard from the perspective of should you do new things if you don’t do things, you make yourself obsolete. If you’re a large profitable enterprise, it takes longer, but it’s the same thing. So for us, the imperative is always how do you stay ahead and then how do you balance that against a manageable risk profile? I think Disney has been quite good at maintaining that balance over the years.

Sometimes one gets it wrong, you build a park and you don’t hit the critical mass you want to, it’s the guest experience, so you have to add attractions and do things that help enhance those experiences. Fine tuning a park once it opens is very important. A little like post-production on a film where you do previews, you look at audience reaction, you tune and adjust the film based upon that.

Once a theme park has a soft opening, an attraction, you’re seeing how people are reacting, seeing what you can do to enhance it, and hopefully based upon the accumulated experience of the enterprise, you don’t get anything fundamentally wrong. That would be an expensive hobby. So finding that balance is part of what the professional discipline of being an Imagineer is much the same as other companies.

Doesn’t matter if, again, you’re in the movie business, doesn’t matter if you’re in the computer business and the mobile device, business companies come and go become more relevant and less relevant based upon their ability to predict and anticipate the future and keep pace with it, but at the same time not put themselves so far into the future that the audience isn’t ready for it. So from our perspective, whether it’s the guest experience or whether it’s part of the larger Disney enterprise, how does online, how television, how does that fit? You’re constantly thinking about all of those things together, but obviously the focus is your specific area of commitment and responsibility.

Dan Heaton: With new technologies coming in and still finding a way when there’s new technologies arriving, the shiny bright ball, whatever you want to call it, how do you stay focused on storytelling or on still finding the core of that? Because I know you worked more on the R&D side, but what is the trick there in terms of just not getting too wowed by the technology and actually being able to stay focused on what the goal is of an attraction or some other new development?

Bran Ferren: Well, that’s a little like saying if you’re a professional tightrope walker, how do you do all of those impressive things and still remember not to fall off the wire? That’s the job. It’s not falling off the wire and the job is staying on track. And so R&D’s role is to provide creative options on one hand, and at the same time, creative solutions on the other hand. So in Disney, there is no isolation between R&D and the storytelling mission and the core Disney mission.

It’s all the same and it’s all integrated together. There are obviously differences in priority. If you are, for instance, in the operations end of the park, you are interested in maintaining guest experience, holding maintenance cost to a reasonable level, having systems that are easy to maintain. If you’re in the creative storytelling side, doing things that nobody has ever seen before that amazes them and is clearly pure magic is your priority rather than what’s it take to fix it and keep it running and maintain.

So the balance between these things are obviously the creative experience, first, sustainability and maintainability and affordability and not stressing the operational environment. Those are things that you all balance together, but it has to lead with creativity and creative vision. And the fact that you have a highly reliable, cost effective, boring attraction isn’t going to create a guest experience that anybody is looking forward to.

So that balance the challenge between it, the competitiveness that we create intentionally within the community, having multiple teams come up with creative solutions for the same question, and then picking the successful one and building upon it from there, that’s all part of the creative process that in the end, should delight abuse people and at the same time be productive for the company. So it can keep doing what it’s doing for a long time to come.

Dan Heaton: Definitely. And that leads into my last question really. I mean, I mentioned that you’re the Chief Creative Officer for Applied Minds and you’re working on advanced technology and design. I’d love to know for you, I mean looking ahead to what you do and what kind of is out there, what excites you right now in terms of new technologies or even advances that we’re going to see or currently seeing just beyond theme parks? Just in our world in general?

Bran Ferren: In general, right now, what excites me is getting behind this biological mess called COVID-19 and novel Coronavirus. And so obviously you don’t have a theme park business if people can’t come together, gather and have shared group experiences. So forgetting theme parks, we all actually need to have lives. So from my perspective, number one is thinking through what does this mean for entertainment, storytelling, et cetera. Number two, how do we create a bright future for our kids?

And what does that mean? How is the notion of a community changing with online connective communities with wireless mobility, new generations of devices are fundamentally changing what’s possible in the human experience. At the same time, all of these new technologies have to be put in the, I mean, we have rules of some, like Moore’s Law basically saying Gordon was talking about transistor density, but that the power of computers, which is how we think about it now, will double every 18 months or for the same computing power will cost half.

Great rule of thumb has been working in one form or another for 30 years. So you have a pretty good idea of what technically you can do at the time. If there’s a Ferren’s law, it’s that people are not driven by Moore’s law. So the same basic notion of family, food, shelter, safety, love, things that have for since the beginning of humankind brought people together, art, the ability to make a better world for our kids. All of these things are common themes which don’t change over time.

So the interesting challenge is how when you take these rapidly evolving technologies, 5G, all sorts of concepts in AR and VR, all sorts of concepts and how you do distributed multiplayer gaming, how do all of these come together to create new experiences based upon those same core values? Storytelling is not going to change. We have the same need to tell and be told stories, the story of your family, the story of our world, the story of society.

You pick the story or of a specific individual, how do you put that together? But how does the theater change? How does the venue change? How did it change from people gathering together to put on a play in the street to invention of a theater, to invention of film, to invention of television to invention of online? The technologies that enable the new generations of storytelling will continuously evolve, but the core reason for it remains constant. So when I look forward, I see these new technologies, wireless mobility being very high on the list, autonomy.

How does the world change with autonomous vehicles and the way we think about transportation? How do we build worlds and cities differently based upon these companies? And at the same time, what is this notion of cloud computing having unlimited compute power available to an individual anywhere? How does that change what the creative possibilities are, what the human values are?

How does it bring families together in different and novel ways? For example, during this coronavirus awful thing that we’re experiencing, I’m able to work effectively from home. I’m able to visit relatives by video conferencing. My daughter is able to take her classes at school, and this wouldn’t have been possible in the same way, 10, 20, whatever number of years ago.

So from my perspective, all of this says if we are thoughtful, if we care about our fellow human beings, if we embrace what we’ve learned about storytelling, art, design, what we take, the new business models that have emerged that enable access to all of the world’s knowledge, we just have a broader creative toolkit to do things that will delight people which improve the quality of their lives, and at the same time impact the fundamentals of how we work, of how we think of what the nation of every country in the world represents as a collective community, as independently.

So to me, it’s those areas that are particularly exciting. How do you combine these new technologies of conductivity, user interface, user experience, and at the same time, how do platforms change as autonomous vehicles, next generation of autonomy vehicles, personal transportation, personal aircraft, supersonic aircraft coming back again, making the world smaller at the same time, being thoughtful about that world. So I think we barely scratched the surface on the impact of technology on people’s lives and barely scratched the surface of the impact of creative thinking on humanity.

Dan Heaton: That’s a great answer. Thank you for that. And yeah, definitely given the current situation with the coronavirus, it’s like you highlighted with technology, it’s changing things now, how we do things, and I’m sure will in the future, and it’s going to be interesting to see where it goes. But brand, thank you so much for talking with me. This has been so great. I really appreciate all the insights and the time, and it’s just been great having you on the podcast.

Bran Ferren: Yeah, it’s been my pleasure and I wish you the best for the future.