Sperra Studios Designed the Screens in Tenet, Captain Marvel, and Bumblebee From a Sound Stage in Maize, Kansas

Movie audiences rarely notice the instrument panel in a cockpit or the wall of monitors in a military control room. Someone designed those screens, and for several major films that someone works in Maize, Kansas. Sperra Studios is a production company that writes, shoots, edits, and delivers commercials, web and educational content, TV shows, and films, and it has specialized in graphic user interface design since the day it opened.

The film and television credits came through the studio's client iSolve. For Warner Bros. Pictures' Tenet (2020), Sperra created UI screens for several scenes and collaborated with motion artist Travis Krause on the cockpit instrumentation of a moving aircraft, which had to track the plane's actual movement to support the story. For Marvel Studios' Captain Marvel (2019), it designed and animated 1990s-inspired flight controls for the Osprey and a vintage web browser window. For Paramount Pictures' Bumblebee (2018), the studio was first asked to concept Bumblebee's heads-up display, nicknamed BeeVision, and ended up creating and animating the hero and background screens for the US Special Operations Control Room, tracking Autobot and Decepticon locations around the globe along with character telemetry.

Television work followed the same pattern. On 20th Century Fox Television's The Passage (2019), Sperra created screen content within an established art direction. On The Gifted, it designed and animated script-specific UI and background displays across two seasons, often building a visual language before knowing every way the show would use it.

Screen graphics are one piece of a larger operation. Sperra started as a small commercial production company more than ten years ago and now positions itself as a production hub for central Kansas, serving local and national clients and other production companies alike. Its services include creative development with writers, directors, and producers; motion graphics and VFX; location sound mixing on a Sound Devices kit with Sanken, DPA, and Sennheiser microphones; and audio post in Pro Tools, Logic, and iZotope. The studio rents a 36-by-50-foot sound stage with a 35-by-20-foot hard cyclorama, lighting grid, 200-amp power, and acoustic treatment. Equipment rental runs through its sister company Kansas Grip, and the team brokers experienced crew for productions unfamiliar with the Kansas market.

The studio's philosophy borrows from John F. Kennedy's line that a rising tide lifts all boats: by making its skills, space, and equipment available to the whole production community, it raises the quality of work across the region. Clients notice. Courtney Doctor, a communicator in St. Louis, says founder Neil and the Sperra crew "breathe energy and life into every project they do" and will "take any project you have and produce something even greater than what you first imagined."

Sperra Studios is located at 7956 W 45th St N in Maize, Kansas. To discuss a project, rent the stage, or book crew, call 316.729.6966 or visit sperrastudios.com.