Coroner’s Tale

{TW: mentions of blood, dead body, and a coroner} 

So I was thinking about what environments tend to have recordings, and I thought about the coroner’s office. My only knowledge of such things comes from movies or tv or books, but there seems to be a consensus. When doctors or physicians perform autopsies, they have a recording tape running nearby so that they can document their findings verbally. I suppose that is better than trying to write as you go, seeing how that might get messy or tedious. Writing with bloody gloves or pausing to take said bloody gloves off would not be very efficient. 

Like most of my story ideas, this one is more like a premise or a setting. A doctor/physician/medical student performing a post mortem. And this person is on a spaceship. 

I want to pay attention to the medium that this story would be told in, to get the best results from it. Boy, would it be cool to make spaceship sounds. Even if it is a pretty big spaceship, coming up with the normal-everyday sounds of a spaceship would be really fun! 

Anyway, this person would be performing some sort of post mortem operation in a spaceship and some sort of mystery will unfold. Maybe there is something wrong with the body, more than just it being dead. Maybe it isn’t quite dead. Whatever happens will come up as I begin to write the script and do more research on coroners. 

Now you might be thinking, how the hell does an intergalactic medical practitioner and a dead body relate to Bob Ross? Well, dear reader, there is more to The Joy of Painting than what appears on the screen or in the audio. One aspect of that show that I want to bring into this project is the pacing. Bob Ross always paints methodically. He begins at the back and paints his way forward, adding his own little bits of story as he paints the necessary parts of the landscape. I would want to start off like he does, slowly, logically, methodically. I am not saying I want to give the listener a whole history of why there is a spaceship in the first place, but I’d start with the immediate situation being pretty obvious. The coroner would begin the audio with the necessary introduction and bits and pieces of the wider narrative, both the facts of being on a spaceship and also why this body, in particular, is a mystery, would be sprinkled in as they completed the autopsy. And in general, I want to bring the attitude that Bob Ross has to this project. To say ‘going with the flow’ is a bit cliche, but it is a simple explanation. Just like Mr. Ross, I want to go wherever this project takes me, and let it pull me along.