Kardashians getting new iPhones every week to self-film ‘KUWTK’ during lockdown in brightly-lit rooms

The Kardashians are known for their high-profile life, they are famous for going the extra mile in whatever they do. So, when coronavirus plagued most of the countries around the world, forcing people to stay inside their homes to save themselves as well as others from the contagious disease, the Kardashians were no exception. They were also left with no choice when California mandated a stay-at-home order.

But the stay-at-home order did not deter the members of the Kardashian-Jenner clan from holding the shooting of their famous reality television series ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’. In a recent interview with Elle, the show’s longtime executive producer Farnaz Farjam revealed that at least two full episodes of the second half of season 18 were shot by the Kardashian-Jenners themselves over the last two months as they all quarantine at their respective homes due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Farjam, who oversees all production from her home in Los Angeles, shared that the idea to self-film was suggested by Kris Jenner in March soon after the lockdown was announced in California. She also revealed that the Kardashians are getting new iPhones every week to shoot themselves for the show.

Describing the whole process, Farjam told the magazine that the shoot-at-home thing was not easy to pull off, but the cast and crew learned to "make it work”. The executive producer’s actual plan was to have the Kardashian-Jenner clan capture footage on their personal cell phones and upload it to a shared album. “But as we [saw it come in], I was like, ‘Oh, people are going to get sick of seeing this [poor quality] footage like this’. We needed to get them proper interview spaces [for confessionals],” Farjam said.

She told the magazine she hired a director of photography and a technician, who configured brightly lit rooms in Kim Kardashian and Khole Kardashian homes after putting on precautionary hazmat suits. They also set phone-friendly tripods before cleaning them up with sanitary wipes. The stars reportedly waited for a day as a precautionary measure before entering the rooms to shoot.

Not only this, but Farjam also revealed that every Monday a safely-masked showrunner goes to their houses and give new iPhones to their security teams, and picks up the old ones they used to film themselves that week. The high maintenance family is reportedly filming around 16 hours of total footage weekly, including group Zoom dinners, which is enough for producers to string together storylines.

"If Kris gets annoyed and walks out of the camera angle, it's not like we can follow her and continue shooting. She has to come back onto the screen and explain [why she walked away]. It’s less fly-on-the-wall because we have to give them direction and they have to be more informative with us… But because this is the Kardashians and they’re entertaining regardless, it will be a fun watch for people,” Farjam said.

"Sometimes you'll hear them mumbling under their breath, 'Who knew a camera person's job would be so hard?!' But, like, that's funny. That's gold. That's stuff we want to include in the show,” Farjam added.