March 29, 2004
"When InDigEnt producers like something, there's no development process," explains November Director Greg Harrison. "They pick a script, they pick someone they trust, and they run with it. They just let us go and make the film."
The New York-based independent production company, which also produced Tadpole, Personal Velocity, and Pieces of April, completed production on November in June of 2003.
The film, which stars Courteney Cox and James Le Gros, is a psychological thriller about a woman's personal struggle to separate illusion from reality as she questions her memory following the murder of her boyfriend. Shot on location in Los Angeles over 15 days, its budget is described as "well under" $1 million. It is one of the first features to be shot with Panasonic's AG-DVX100 24p camera.
The idea for November began when screenwriter Benjamin Brand, a friend of Harrison, and Brand's producing partner, Danielle Renfrew, wrote a script based on a newspaper account of a convenience store robbery. Harrison and Renfrew were intrigued by the story: it pushed genre boundaries, could be made on DV, and was written intentionally as a low-budget film with four main characters and five main locations.
The cinematographer, Nancy Schreiber, ASC, whose credits include dozens of independent features, documentaries, music videos, and TV movies and pilots, had shot mostly on 35mm and 16mm, as well as two high-def projects. She had never used Mini DV before.
"From the outset I knew [shooting digital] is what InDigEnt does," she recalls, "so there was not even a question of trying to convince the producers [otherwise]." She acknowledges she was somewhat "rattled," knowing that November, with her name on it and shot with cameras costing under $3,000, would compete at Sundance with films shot on 35mm.
Schreiber had little to worry about. In addition to being able to control light and color to her satisfaction, she was able to do things with the DVX100 that are impossible with larger formats. For example, during preproduction "we were able to take the camera to locations we were considering. You never have that luxury when you're shooting 35mm. When we located the store where much of the film takes place, we were able to take the camera there and look at what the available light was like, and then I could determine what I wanted to turn off, what I wanted to change by adding units and controlling the color."
Schreiber was cautious not to overshoot-a trap that some digital filmmakers fall into because of tape's low cost in relation to film. "When people decide to use a digital format, one reason given is that tape is cheap," she says. "They think, 'We'll just keep running between takes.' But all of the material eventually needs to be converted, someone has to log it, someone has to use it for editing. If you keep the camera running, it shows a lack of discipline. Although we used two cameras, we were incredibly disciplined."
Then came post, an area in which Harrison played a much greater role than the typical director. Indeed, he was November's editor. With a background in both computers and editorial work, he was fully in control of everything that happened to the images once they left the camera.
According to the director, the post process for November had to be invented: "We were one of the first features to be shot on this camera, and post workflow hadn't really been worked out for NTSC-based 24p cameras."
Harrison and InDigEnt decided to use Avid's Adrenaline uncompressed system, which was still at the beta test stage. The footage, shot using 24p and recorded onto NTSC tapes, was digitized and transferred to Adrenaline's hard drives. In addition to cutting the movie, Adrenaline was used to add effects. "The movie has a lot of visual experimentation," says Harrison. "I hired artist Lew Baldwin to work with me on these very abstract visual effects."
Adrenaline was also employed for the audio. "We didn't record audio to camera," explains Harrison. "We recorded DAT on the set and digitized it all into the Avid, so we had pristine audio to work with."
Once the cut was complete, Skywalker Sound, north of San Francisco, was engaged for sound design. They imported everything into Pro Tools. Tape-to-tape color correction was executed at LaserPacific in Hollywood.
At the final stage, the digital information in Adrenaline, including audio received from Skywalker, was copied from the hard drive to a DigiBeta tape. At LaserPacific, that DigiBeta was blown up to HD via a Teranex box in realtime. That HD tape was then taken to Sundance for November's premiere, where it was projected in glorious 1080i.
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