SO HOW DID WE GET HERE ?
MUSCLECAR represents seven years of what we call in the biz ‘Hard Yakka’. This film is the directorial debut of Dwayne Labbé a former Disney, Warners & Hanna-Barbara animator. Dwayne has won countless awards for his work on commercials, television series and feature films culminating in the highest accolade to date, two daytime Emmy awards for his contribution to the Disney series Winnie The Pooh.
The film is also the first to be produced by Aaran Creece and started back in 2005 when Dwayne and Aaran met at the New York International Film & Video Festival. They both won awards for seperate films in that festival. They struck up a friendship and both embarked on numerous passion projects together with limited success until deciding on MUSCLECAR.
Like most first time filmmaking teams you start with nothing but an idea and very little cash to fund it. Little did they know when Dwayne wrote the first draft for the film back in 2009 that it would take some eight years before the film would be completed.
What Dwayne and Aaran had created was a story that was achievable based on the elements they could bring together and utilise their skill set to pull off a film that was all about a simple idea of a car that run on blood. Or so they thought.
The production was broken down into key categories starting with the shoot, which was completed by April 2010, and then a long and protracted post-production process. The edit required a number of passes and the inclusion of both animated sequences and comic book style panels that helped tell the story and solve big parts of the production that they just didn’t have the budget to shoot.
They then moved into audio post and once again the film required many passes before they had a product that matched the edit. The final and most truncated phase was working on the legal releases. The main issue they faced related to the final soundtrack and score. In effect tracking down all concerned was akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
Now the film is complete and ready for human consumption. There is nothing quite like MUSCLECAR in the market place right now. That’s not to say that its unique, more that it’s not your usual genre film from Australia.
