Even in his relatively short career, Reid has watched new technologies fundamentally transform the production industry. On the film side, pre-visualization has become a huge area that can streamline a production by getting exactly what the director wants to see into the 3D pipeline more effectively, according to Reid. Rendering times are coming down through GPU/CPU scaling. "All of these innovations tend to quickly trickle down to people like me, which is fantastic," Reid says. "With 3D, interactive hardware shading has done quite a bit to alleviate time consuming render tests for me, which was a bottleneck."

Compositing, color-correction, and editing performance have also been greatly improved with widespread adoption of Avid Adrenaline and Nitris hardware. "On the video side, I can take any of my projects and simply drop them onto a higher-end system like the Adrenaline or Nitris and start working," Reid says. "That was one of the main reasons I run Avid Xpress Pro on my notebook."

Another reason he runs Xpress Pro is because it supports the new Panasonic AGDVX100 24p camera. "This is a key piece of the equation for me," Reid says. "This camera has provided so much for so many people who want to shoot digitally on a budget and have the final product translate well into the film arena if they choose to go that route."

Reid saw the potential of digital filmmaking when he watched the film November at the Sundance Film Festival this year. The film was shot using the Panasonic DVX100 in MiniDV, but he says it could have easily been shot on HD and he wouldn't have known the difference. "The keys were great cinematography and the way it was brought up to HD, but here was a $3500 camera putting up world-class imagery," Reid says. "I purchased the same camera a year before, and now all I think about is creating imagery that comes out looking as good as November."

Of course, there are limits to being a one-man shop can do. There is some, very advanced rendering that is beyond Antigravity's purview. "Since 3D can be so time consuming, the paying projects tend to be ones that are fairly limited by budget or time constraints," Reid explains. "Since they know I am a one person-shop, the client tends to know that I'm not necessarily capable of turning around photo realistic characters fully animated in a short amount of time." Because of this, many of Antigravity's projects, for now, consist primarily of product visualizations and less time-sensitive animations

Although Reid treasures his independence, he acknowledges there might come a time, and soon, where it might have to expand his company. Reid is talking to an architect and a 3D artist about expanding into pre-visualization, virtual sets, and general modeling and animation. "I think the key for me right now is to slowly expand into an operation that is able to handle higher-end video or film projects. Reid says. "That might mean I hire a graphic designer to take the pressure off of me so I can focus on video and 3D projects."