Before any of this, there was a teenager with a paintbrush.

Gavin's painting teacher at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts was Kent Twitchell — one of the artists who defined the American mural — the kind of hand-painted, photorealistic work that goes up on the side of a building and outlasts everyone who made it. Twitchell brought him on as an apprentice, working summers on murals across LA. His first credited work, at sixteen, was a mural of twenty-six marathon runners on a CalTrans wall along the 405. Years later, he took two years away from his BFA studies at RISD to work with Twitchell again — on a commissioned portrait of Michael Jackson slated for the El Capitan Theatre, and an eight-story monument to the LA Chamber Orchestra that still runs the length of a downtown parking structure. That training — learning to see at architectural scale, to work in public, to finish what you start even when it takes years — came before any of it.

Then, in 2000, he picked up a computer for the first time and started making Flash animation.

What followed reads like a pattern once you see it: Flash, then 3D animation and VFX certification at Gnomon, then a decade at Yahoo building some of the first VR ad formats the industry had ever shipped, then gigapixel photography — a technique he learned on a Yosemite capture project so large it took twenty teams to shoot. In 2014 he co-founded Panogs, the studio behind everything that followed: a TIME Magazine cover, an Emmy-winning VR documentary on Everest, gigapixel reconstructions of Bay Area landmarks, and a fulldome film about deep time in the Australian outback. Now it's generative AI: production pipelines built for a 132-year-old wool mill and a major game studio, through Bespoken AI Solutions, the studio he runs now — treated with the same instinct that made the murals, the ad formats, and the gigapixel panoramas work: learn the medium completely, then use it to say something real.