How Love In The Time Of Corona Was Made… In The Time Of Corona

The first you think you probably noticed about Love in the Time of Corona is that it doesn't look like a Zoom call. What Freeform pulled off with this limited series is a refreshing change of pace in sea of virtual specials (and even star-studded HBO movies) filmed from home.

It feels silly to point out the Zoom of it all, but just about every other bit of new televised content that has come out of the pandemic this year has looked relatively the same. Late night hosts took to their garages and attics to interview guests over video call. Parks and Recreation and the Apple TV+ series Mythic Quest took great pains to mail iPhones back and forth between cast and crew members to compile footage — but both episodes, while excellent and creative in different ways, resembled the virtual meetings and happy hours we’ve become all too accustomed to these days. Even HBO’s upcoming Coastal Elites appears to rely on front facing camera techniques. 

"I didn't want to do a show with just people Zooming," Love in the Time of Corona creator Joanna Johnson (Good Trouble, The Fosters) told Refinery29 over the phone. "We really wanted to figure out a way to do a real show."

So how the heck did Freeform pull off a limited series filmed in isolation with "real cameras" (no disrespect to the iPhone 11) that looks more or less like a regular scripted TV show?

The show was filmed in California between June and July. At that point, cases were still rising but the state was in Stage 3 reopening — making filming with precautions legally possible. That was key, though the threat of another full shutdown loomed.

Simply put: Love in the Time of Corona cast actors who live with other actors and filmed at their real homes. Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton) and Nicolette Robinson (The Affair) have been married for eight years. Another married couple, Gil Bellows (The Shawshenk Redemption) and Rya Kihlstedt (Deep Impact) also appear with their family. Tommy Dorfman (13 Reasons Why) and Rainey Qualley (Ocean's 8) were quarantining together too.

The need to find actors in close proximity to one another affected the scripts as well. "I had a story about two sisters who were quarantining together and had kind of an estranged relationship," says Johnson, but couldn't find two available actresses quarantining together who either were sisters or could play sisters. "So that didn't work out."

After everyone was cast, Johnson put together a writer's room with four other people and the team refined the fictional stories around the quarantine dynamics available with the existing cast.

First and foremost, Freeform sent cleaning crews to each location. Then crew members ran cable into the actors' home so that cameras could be set up inside. There were only seven people on the crew. Only one crew member at a time was allowed inside at a time to adjust equipment and would wipe down anything they touched before the actors returned to the space. Director of Photographer Marco Fargnoli and Johnson met over Facetime to "scout" the locations and work out blocking. Everyone wore PPE and masks, including the actors when they were not shooting in character, and while filming, everyone communicated from a safe distance or through walkie talkies. Each home designated a family member or friend that was quarantining with them as a PA that could help out, as well.

Johnson says there were two cameras with WiFi monitors set up outside and crew members in individual vans or tents. "We could control the focus. We could control the zooming in and out. Then we had one camera that our DP could actually pan or tilt. He could do some camera moves, but nothing really elaborate. We couldn't dolly the cameras at all," she specified. In most cable dramas, cameras can be mounted on a camera dolly, or a wheeled track that allows a camera to physically move along it in order to create a smooth shot. But for the purposes of Love in the Time of Corona, cameras had to remain stationary for all indoor shots.

"It was like a super professional student film," Johnson says of the intimate and collaborative nature of shooting, with every crew member taking on multiple jobs in order to keep everyone safe and healthy. What results is an intimate and collaborative show that is, just like life and love in a pandemic, not all Zoom calls all of the time.