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.