Emily James on the Collaborative Creation of Coronaville

After training in documentary directing at the U.K. National Film and Television School and spending 20 years working in the factual sector, Emily James (Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws; Silk Road: Drugs, Death and the Dark Web) had the opportunity to shadow Jim Loach on an ITV drama and decided it was time for a change.

Loach “was such a kind and beautiful man, and he let me watch him for a week,” James says. “Within two days of watching him, I thought, I want that job.” She was determined for her next job to be a drama project.

With the factual work she had done and the contacts she had made over her career, she was able to land meetings but had trouble getting attached to any productions. “I kept being told, It would be really useful if you just had two or three award-winning [scripted] short films,” she says.

While spending a year in L.A. living with family so her son could attend a robotics school, she made progress toward that suggestion. Right before that short film was set to begin production in April 2020, however, the city went on lockdown due to the wave of Covid-19 infections sweeping the world. Stuck in a house with her parents and her sister’s family and trapped indoors by “biblical” rain—a rarity in and of itself for L.A.—she realized they would be stuck in the situation for a while and needed to find a way to cope, James says.

“I just thought to myself, I’ve got to do something,” she explains. “I’ve got to make something. I don’t particularly like to bake or cook or do macramé, [but] I can’t just sit on my hands and do nothing. And then sometime during that first week, I came up with the idea for Coronaville,” a found-footage-style comedy following the different types of personalities brought out by the lockdowns, including a hypochondriac, a mom barely holding it together while having to deal with homeschooling—inspired partly by James herself—a couple seriously focused on their sourdough starter, a conspiracy theorist and more.

While determining how to go about the project, she “found a couple of Facebook groups; there was one that was so specific, like, ‘Film and TV professionals stuck at home in the lockdown,’” James says. “I wrote this post [that] said, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’d really like to be making something now, and I think I have an idea for what it could be. If anybody would like to come and join me with that, I’d love your help and collaboration. Let’s go make something. I’m not going to try and convince a commissioning editor to give me money for this right now. I just want to be making.”

Luckily, “a handful of incredibly talented people answered my call into the void” and offered to join the volunteer-led production, James says. This includes Hayley Annikki, “who ultimately became the lead producer. I never could have done this without her. She wore so many hats along the way that it was just astonishing.”

Others who helped the project come to fruition amid the lockdowns were Lizzy Ana Wakefield, another producer, and Nathaniel Miller, director of photography, who also “sort of became the head of figuring out technical problems”—an essential part of the team when much of the work was done over Zoom.

The entire production was very collaborative the whole way through, with the filming done remotely and the actors having to take charge of departments they normally would be nowhere near.

Each filming day, everyone would get on a Zoom call together, and Miller “worked out this app that people could put on their phones, called Film.io, which allowed him to remotely control their phone cameras so that he could get the exposures right,” James explains. “Then we would say to the person, Show us all the lights that you own in your house. He would pick the lights, and then we would use them to light the scene. The actors had to be like their own grips and camera.”

“It was the same for every department,” she continues. “Hayley did most of the costume work. I would give her a brief about what I thought a character would probably wear, and then she would get that actor on a Zoom [ahead of the shoot] and say, Show me all the clothes in your wardrobe. What do you think your character would wear? Then that person would pull out the clothes that they thought their character would wear, the two of them would narrow it down, and then she’d get me on the call, and I would be like, OK, that one for that scene and that one for this scene. So, the actors also had to do their own costume department.”

They were even involved with set dressing, as they would “walk” James around their homes over Zoom, and she would note where pillows could be moved or where piles of books might be useful to fit with the characters’ backstories.

Beyond that, “some of the scripts were written by the actors that performed them,” James says. Yvonne Paretzky “wrote [her character’s] script. Nadaav [Soudry], who played Mike Mo Money, that was his character. He wrote that. I asked if I could ‘steal’ it and put it in the show.”

After lots of shooting through Zoom—and one in-person shoot, as James was eventually able to make it home to the U.K., near where Soudry also lived—James then had the task of editing the series. “I had to get it through post, and that was really hard with no money,” she says. “That took a longer time than I had hoped it was going to, but I was relentless, didn’t give up and managed to get it through post. It took two years, but I did it. We got it there. We got it finished!”

A friend was able to recommend a distributor she could show the series to, James says, and then Prime Video picked it up for U.K. audiences.

“I couldn’t be more chuffed about the fact that our little show that we made for [a] whole budget less than $3,000” is now available to viewers, James says. “People are going to get to watch it!”

Viewers in the U.K. can take in all three episodes of James’ passion project—a production that got quite a few industry professionals through the initial trying times of the Covid lockdowns—on Prime Video now.