Andy Reynolds, founder of the Minneapolis-based broadcast design studio Motion504, is a nice guy. Normally, when Coastal Dwellers describe Midwesterners as "nice," it’s code for "not as sharp as us 24/7 power people." That’s not the case with Reynolds; he’s entrepreneurial, talented and congenial. He just happens to have his priorities in order- it’s one of those "quality of life" things.

Founded in January 2005, Motion504 is a broadcast design, effects and animation studio "specializing in the art of motion." True to its name, Motion504 creates only motion graphics. Reynolds and his team don’t work in print or on Web sites, even if it’s part of a package they’re designing. The facility’s work is pretty much evenly split between television and high-definition in-store marketing campaigns for clients like Best Buy and Target, also based in Minneapolis.

Motion504 created the animated opening for the show Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on The Travel Channel (you know, that show where the host travels around the world eating tarantulas and bull testicles). Discovery Networks also hires the shop to do a lot of its promo work, such as the groovy animated sequence Motion504 created to promote Space Week on The Science Channel. Says Reynolds of the project, in typical nice-guy fashion, “That one is super-easy for me to brag about because I had hardly anything to do with it.”

Now, about those priorities…Motion504 has a grand total of five employees: four creative director-level designers and animators, and one executive producer, and they’re not going to get any bigger. "No one here, including me, is interested in growing just for the sake of growing," explains Reynolds, who says he quit the freelance life because he often worked alone and, therefore, stopped learning from other people. So he decided to create an atmosphere where "artists together, working together" could bounce ideas off each other. The result was Motion504.

Everyone works on every project and Reynolds encourages an atmosphere of free-floating collaboration. There’s no support staff, which means there’s no designated flunky to deal with the FedEx guy or to make a 3 p.m. Starbucks run. It’s a communal, egalitarian society. "You have to have respect for the work and for the people working on the project," says Reynolds. "I learned early in my career that you can produce exceptional work and never be overbearing, never be condescending, never rule by fear."

Housed in an old warehouse space in downtown Minneapolis, Motion504’s 2,400-square-foot studio has no offices, cubicles or conference rooms; everyone sits out in the open. "We don’t need to have a meeting to talk to each other," he says proudly.

Reynolds got his start as a Flame artist in Iowa. Back in the days when there were about a dozen people in the entire country who knew Flame, they used to congregate on a chat site called "Flame News." One day he got an email from Minneapolis with this curious subject heading: "Who the hell is using Flame in Iowa?" That email led to a job in the Twin Cities and, with the exception of some freelance gigs in LA, including The Academy Awards, he hasn’t left the area since.

Do he and his colleagues ever feel isolated working in the middle of the fly-over zone? "We don’t even see our clients who live here," explains Reynolds, who gets the majority of his work through reputation and word-of-mouth. But certainly, he ventures out to the coasts to drum up business, right? Reynolds ponders that for a moment, then says in an entirely unconvincing manner, "Yeah, I really should hustle for more work." Nothing dumb about that.