Steve Gawley began his model making career as a student of Industrial
Design at the campus of California State University at Long Beach,
California. In 1975,while in school,he was recommended for a drafting
job at George Lucas' newly formed film company, Industrial Light &
Magic. Soon, Gawley became a visual effects model maker at ILM after
completing orthographic drawings,of the now famous Star Wars
spaceships. His pickup truck was later used to film the infamous Star
Wars Deathstar "Trench Battle" sequence. Steve was one of the first 14
ILM employees that were hired by Lucas. ILM eventually grew to over
1000 employees, today enabling it to work on several high profile film
projects each year. Gawley stayed with the ILM model shop for 31 years,
until it was sold in August 2006.
Gawley helped introduce several state-of-the-art prototype construction
methods and techniques that the ILM model shop have employed on many of
their projects. While at ILM, Gawley had the privilege of working with
some of the most successful film directors in recent motion picture
history. Gawley has worked on 18 Academy Award nominated films during
his visual effects model making career. It was during his 60+ feature
film project tenure there, that he supervised the budgeting,the
fabrication of prototype models and miniature sets that were built and
photographed for 11 of ILM's 15 Academy Award winning,cutting edge
visual effects film projects.
