Steve Drew is an award winning Australian visual effects supervisor based in New York City with over 25 years of experience in post-production.
He has crafted content for feature films, episodic tv series, commercials, documentaries and music videos, either as an artist, supervisor or both.
Beginning in 1997, Steve’s first career was as a film editor, with a focus on advertising. Decorated with several ‘best editing’ awards and responsible for the post on over two-hundred commercial campaigns in and around Australia, he also oversaw productions of TV series and documentary in his role as general manager and post-supervisor of a boutique editorial house in Perth, Western Australia.
Dabbling in visual effects since 2003, he made the transition to full-time visual effects artist in 2010 – beginning work on feature films at Iloura, Melbourne. There, Steve worked on over a dozen features – most notably, Mad Max: Fury Road, for which Iloura was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Practical and digital effects, living in harmony.
Framestore took an interest in Steve and relocated him to their New York City studio in 2015. Skilled at both supervising visual effects production on-set, and in leading teams of artists in the studio, Steve has earned many accolades for his output, including a coveted VES (Visual Effects Society) award for ‘outstanding compositing’ on Spike Jonze’s HomePod film for Apple. He has also received the ADC Black Cube, two D&AD pencils, a One Show Gold Pencil, and two further VES nominations for both compositing and ‘outstanding overall visual effects’. See the awards page for more detail.
An avid lover of practical special make-up effects, Steve likes to always get as much in camera as possible – only relying on digital visual effects when necessary. His editorial background makes his decision making very practical, and his dedication to how to best serve the story means he does not like to employ visual effects for the sake of them.
Steve has lived in Perth, London, Melbourne and New York, and has taken contracts that based him for a time in Cardiff, Los Angeles and Tokyo. He holds a Diploma of Art, Film & Television (1995-1997) and is an active voting member of both the Visual Effects Society (VES), and of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA). He is also a cycling enthusiast and recreational photographer.
Left to right: Michael Ralla, Steve Drew, Peter Timberlake.
