19/05/2025
Post by Toby Zoates about Virgin Beats: What isn't mentioned is a lot of the post-production of the movie Virgin Beasts was done at the Gunnery = the pick ups (things missed in the original shoot at the Slaughterhouse in Redfern and cut into the final edit); most of the animation cells were painted by Jonno (Driscoll) - thousands of them, there's a lot of old style animation in the film; Ian Rose made some wonderful props and set pieces (eg. the artificial baby incubator); Virgin Beasts is a punk/grunge musical and some of the music was created by Gunnery musicians; a few short animated sequences were designed and painted by Gunnery artists (Jonno, Ben Cahill, Ian Rose); the final film and sound edit was done by Marcus Gillezeau. Without the Gunnery crew the movie wouldnt have been finished to its grungy perfection. It was premiered at JellyHeadz punk garage in Camperdown in 1992 and again Gunnery musicians played that night. At the very next Mardi Gras parade 1993 the Gunnery crew built me a float on a truck to promote Virgin Beasts from which I threw several hundred flyers. It rained that night but it was one of the best nights of my life. I cop a lot of s**t over the years for this difficult production such as I didnt pay the artists enough.
With great difficulty, over 5 years of hassling the Auz Film Commission with reams of application/production notes, scripts and budgets THEY finally gave me some money and I paid EVERYONE! It wasnt a Hollywood budget but coming from the gutter Ive learned to slice the sausage fairly and managed to give EVERYONE a piece. I started this project in 1996 and finished in 1992, I was 36 when I started and had a lot of energy and determination. But I honestly dont know how I did it, writing, producing, directing, acting, singing, animating, drawing everything. And then I collapsed.
Troma of New York distributed it all around the world, made a fortune with it but only paid me $1000. In 1996 it won Best Trash Film at Freakzone 1st International Trash Film Festival Lille France. The French punks particularly liked the music and animation.
