Back in the spring of 2020, Marked Pictures halted preproduction on a feature project as Gibson and Smith sheltered in place. Naïve and hopeful that everything would be back to "normal" within a couple of months, the filmmakers decided to shoot a quick-and-dirty little sketch on their rooftop, using a smartphone as a camera, as a temporary creative outlet. It was to be a "meet cute" scene featuring a socially distanced singalong on the ukulele. Little did they know what the rest of the year had in store.

As spring rolled into summer, the pandemic raged and Black Lives Matter took to the streets. The little sketch took on a life of its own, and what had been conceived as a one-weekend shoot ballooned into a long-term daily ritual (weather permitting). The script evolved along with the filmmakers' world outlook,  and luckily continuity was not an issue thanks to the face masks worn by the characters.

The indefinite timeline permitted extreme pickiness when it came to the background and lighting conditions. After some test shoots on the roof, it was determined that the ideal time of day to shoot was the hour before Golden Hour, and the ideal sky was partly cloudy but not hazy, and with no clouds covering the sun itself. Checking the weather forecast for 5pm, therefore, became a daily ritual. Shooting had to be paused for a week when the skies hazed over due to the ferocity of the wildfires blazing in the West.

The filmmakers set themselves the challenge of getting (1) an opening shot of birds walking around on the roof and being scared away by the arrival of one of the characters and (2) a closing shot of the birds swooping down and landing back on the roof after the characters had left. It took weeks of training the local pigeons and mourning doves with birdseed, but in the end they got both shots.

In the end, between pre-production test shots and the shoot itself, the production spent 50 days (albeit only about an hour a day) shooting on the roof to capture footage that was assembled into a ten-minute real-time story. As this project marked only the second time Smith and Gibson had operated a camera, many mistakes involving exposure, focus, etc. were made and corrected. The production became a meditative process—at the same time each day, as the sun was sinking towards the skyline, the actor-filmmakers headed to the roof to reenact the same few minutes of story. The ritual provided not only a creative outlet but also a daily life intermission.