November (film) - Production

Production

Harrison, Brand and Renfrew intended the film to be set and shot in San Francisco, but problems arose with their proposal. Cox had a commitment to Friends, which was in production in Los Angeles, and the film's production costs did not allow the entire production team to relocate to northern California for the duration for the shoot. The film-makers were forced to shoot in Los Angeles, but Renfrew later expressed no regret in their decision: "We wanted the story to take place in an anonymous urban area. And I think we were successful in doing that".

Production finally began on May 19, 2003, and took place on Cox's days off from her Friends shooting schedule. Renfrew's home in Los Angeles stood in for the apartment of Cox's character in the film. The budget did not allow the luxury of trailers, but with some persuading, neighbouring apartments were converted into staging areas. For her role Cox donned glasses with thick frames, and had her hair cut by seven inches and a grey streak dyed into it. Harrison said, "She's seen in the fashion world as glamorous, a pop icon from Friends, so how to dress her down, and also make her body feel different. I had her wear those clothes around the house to feel like a different person".

The film's cinematographer was Nancy Schreiber, who had never before shot a film on Mini-DV. Harrison intended the shifts between chapters of the film—and Sophie's emotions—to be signalled visually, and he instructed Schreiber to employ different colour casts accordingly. For the opening robbery scenes (which recur throughout the film), Schreiber purchased two Panasonic AG-DVX100 cameras with white balance and color temperature controls. She used them with lighting gels and sodium street lamps that surrounded the real-life convenience store where the crew was shooting to make the image appear green. A similar process was used in the second movement of the narrative, which was bathed in orange to represent Sophie's despair, while white expressed "acceptance" in the film's third and final act. To help achieve a blue colour cast for the first phase of the film ("denial"), Schreiber surrounded the shooting locations with machines that pumped smoke across the set. Cinematographer and Sundance Film Festival judge Frederick Elmes commented of Schreiber's work, "She lit it and used colors in a way that the camera responded. And I don't think that's the kind of thing you do by accident. That's completely designed".

Harrison applauded the speed of Mini-DV for allowing such a short shoot: "We could shoot with multiple cameras at times, which helped us in our schedule". He also cited the advantages Mini-DV had in post-production, estimating that 75%–80% of the visual and sound design processing had been performed on desktop computers. November was shot in fifteen days on a budget of $150,000, and post-production costs were the same – a typical production model for films produced by InDiGent. Of the tight schedule and production costs, Harrison said, "I don't recommend shooting a movie that way and I don't want to do it again to be honest. It's really, really taxing".

Once shooting had wrapped, Harrison entered the editing room and constructed the film over the course of eighteen weeks, occasionally consulting colleagues such as Sarah Flack (editor of The Limey (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003)). Harrison, who had started out in the film industry as an editor, noted the strong involvement of key creative personnel throughout the pre-production, production and post-production stages, and called it "kind of a more holistic approach to post-production". He described the experience of editing the film alone (for the most part) as "brutal" and "exhausting", but he said he was satisfied with his work nonetheless. When asked about the film's seventy-three-minute running time, Renfrew said that Harrison "let the story and the film dictate the length as opposed to trying to force it to be any particular length".