Story-Telling: Research for my Story

Because my entire story is based in and around a hospital and about young parents I thought it best I do some background research before I began writing the script.

I began by doing some research on the hospital environment itself. I looked into what a hospital sounds and feels like. I even visited my local hospital. I need to recreate this feeling on screen and in the way I describe the locations in the script. I found that hospitals have a very clean feeling and tend to be quiet in most areas. The corridors some areas are busy, but others are not. The stair wells, something I want to use, are clean and echoey. I looked at how the delivery wards feel. There is still a quiet element but the sounds of women giving birth do tend to fill the area. The waiting room has a tense atmosphere with people nervously waiting to meet newborns. Nurses and midwives roam the corridors moving between rooms, checking on the expectant parents.

To find out more about the delivery room I watched a few episodes of a show called One Born Every Minute on Channel 4. In this show they have placed cameras all around a hospital delivery ward to capture the incredible things that go on. In the show you get to see the full process that takes place on the ward. This starts with the soon to be parents arriving and ends with them leaving, hopefully with a newborn, however sometimes this is not the case. Miscarriage is a heavy topic and something some of my family members have been through. I have decided not to include this in my story. The show deals with these real stories in a manner which still lets the audience see pretty much everything, even the birth. We get to see the challenges these parents face and we get to see how the fathers deal with it, something that relates heavily to my own story. Watching the show has really helped me think about how my character would react to the birth of his son and how both parents would be feeling on the day of the birth. It's a huge mix of emotions that I have to get across in the way I write the script and the way my actors say the lines.

My research into the hospital environment has really helped me think about where I could shoot the story and how I could describe the environment in my script. This research was essential and I'm glad I have carried it out.

Hear are some photos of the kind of environment I'm aiming for:

Hospital corridor

Hospital Stairwell

Hospital Waiting Room

Entrance to a delivery ward