Liberty St is a web drama series co-created by former Canberran Duncan Ragg during COVID-19

COVID-19 restrictions are in place, making life difficult in all sorts of ways.

That's where Duncan Ragg - who last year was touring with Bell Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing including his former home of Canberra - found himself this year.

But he decided to make use of the restrictions in a creative way.

Liberty St is a web series - eight episodes, each seven minutes long - created by Ragg and TV writer and script editor Jessica Marshall.

It was filmed in Ragg's doomed apartment block (he was moving out the day of the interview).

Ragg says it is the first Australian isolation series to be shot with a full crew under strict lockdown conditions.

The process of creating Liberty St - from inception, writing and filming to the final series - spanned eight weeks across the worst of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.

Ragg funded the project but most of those involved worked for nothing, seizing the opportunity to be creative despite the uncertain times and difficult conditions.

Liberty St, Ragg says, explores intimacy, loss and what is revealed about ourselves in isolation.

"It's all set in an apartment block during isolation - our apartment block."

The eight stories were written to conform with government regulations at the time of the so each has a small crew and one live actor.

Seven directors worked on the series and while there were locations around the building, much of it was filmed in two of the apartments - including Ragg's.

"It was all turned upside down," he says, and the set decorator was kept busy, having "to turn each room into something different".

Marshall, Ragg says, had problems of her own: she had obtained her green card and sold up everything to go to Los Angeles and work on a project with David E. Kelley (Boston Legal).

"Three days later, she was sleeping on her mother's living room floor in rural Victoria."

Despite the difficulties, the writers - who attended NIDA together - collaborated via Zoom and the project gathered momentum.

Other actors involved include Harry Greenwood (Hacksaw Ridge), Charles Wu (Doctor Doctor), Catherine Van-Davies (Hungry Ghosts) and Steve Rodgers (The Code).

Each episode focuses on a different character.

In the first, Sophie (played by Sara West) has been involved with someone in New York City who seems to have been ghosting her for the last three months.

Did he want to end the relationship or is there some other reason for the lack of communication?

There seems to be no way to find out what happened.

"She can't fly over to the States."

Another character, Ragg says, has been suffering mental health problems because of the isolation.

"He sees two of himself. He's losing his marbles."

Various locations were used for the filming - stairwells, hallways - and Ragg's own apartment was also a set.

"It was all turned upside down."

Ragg, 32, was born in Goulburn and came to Canberra with his family when he was nine. It changed his life.

He says. "I didn't know what drama was. I hadn't seen a play until I went to Canberra Grammar."

One of his teachers at the school encouraged him to pursue creative writing. This led to a theatrical passion to add to his love of cinema, especially European cinema.

He undertook an arts/law degree at the ANU and ran the university's theatre society.

But although he contemplated a legal career, drama prevailed, and he went on to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

A lot of his work has been in independent theatre and in 2012 he co-founded The Corinthian Food Store, a Sydney-based collective "dedicated to creating new work about the experience of living in Australia today".

Liberty St was created despite the challenges of COVID-19 and is online to watch for a fee. Ragg says that "in the absence of meaningful government assistance for the arts, this work gave hope in what felt like the darkest of times for our livelihoods and dreams.

"This is a love letter to ourselves, our artistic community and each other - to say that from the dark of night, there will always be an uplifting dawn."