He is an award-winning 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 "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."