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YUNGBLUD just doesn’t stop delivering! ‘Zombie’ is another triumph. The song’s video highlights the awe-inspiring job our nurses do – and now it’s your turn to celebrate someone else doing something incredibly important. Let’s go!

ACTIVITY 1

Ultimately, you’re going to create a poem, story or storyboard of your own. But let’s start by taking a closer look at how the brilliant YUNGBLUD and his team have structured the narrative in his ‘Zombie’ video.

Answer the questions below.

  1. The video starts with the nurse sitting in a pool of light, but otherwise surrounded by dark. Why is that significant? What does it suggest about the nurse and/or about the world around her? What can we infer about how she feels and about her character?
  2. Look at the painting on the back wall in that first scene? What do you think it’s a painting of? What effect does it have? Might it symbolise something?
  3. The camera zooms in slowly on the nurse but we’re not given a close-up yet. How might this be significant? What is the video encouraging us to feel/think?
  4. We see the nurse smiling at her first patient (the older woman). What are we learning about the nurse? How does our understanding of her deepen thanks to the positioning of this moment between her sitting in the chair at start and then on her own in the staff room? What can we infer about her character?
  5. The second patient is a young woman, lying in the bed. When she turns her face, what do we notice? What are we learning about the nurse’s life and/or about the life of the patients? What we learning about life generally?
  6. Why does the camera show the nurse again in the staff room? What are we meant to understand about her life? How is our opinion of the nurse developing?
  7. We see the nurse with the cancer patient receiving treatment. What role does the nurse play? What does she offer the patient? What is the message of the video, do you think?
  8. When the nurse is sitting on the bed what do you notice about the nurse’s reflection when we see her in the mirror? How is the message of the video highlighted in this moment?
  9. We then see the nurse again in the staff room. By coming back to this same kind of scene so regularly, what is the writer building our understanding of? If we’d only seen inside the staff room once, would we our understanding of the nurse’s situation be less complete?
  10. We are then given a close-up of the nurse. Why has it taken until nearly halfway through the video to give the audience this zoomed in moment? What are we being asked to understand about the nurse?
  11. When the nurse is sitting in the bath, why do we see the wings in the mirror but not on the nurse? Why doesn’t she notice the wings?
  12. Why is she in a bath? What does the water symbolise?
  13. A little later, at 3:06 we see the nurse screaming and crying. How do we feel? How does everything we’ve watched up until this point help us make sense of the moment?
  14. The director then cuts through scenes very quickly. Why such speed? What does this rapid-fire effect help us understand about the nurse’s life?
  15. The child at the end strokes the nurse’s wings and the nurse then notices they’re there. Is this an effective ending? Why/why not? What does she realise about her life that she’s not fully realised until now?

ACTIVITY 2

You are now going to create your own story, poem or video storyboard (or even a video, if you prefer and are able!). Decide on a person you think deserves more recognition: this could be someone who does an important job that serves all people (e.g. a policeman) or someone close to you (e.g. a parent). OR you will write about one of the ‘characters’ you have met in the poems.

Your story should create a sense of how tough life can be for the person you’re writing about. If relevamt, it should also underline the positive impact that person has on the world around them.

TIPS:

  1. See below for words that will give your writing with a sense of personality and sophistication. Also use colour words to build atmosphere and mood.
  2. Describe the weather, the light, the darkness etc. These things can be detailed used the vocab below and will help enhance the atmosphere.
  3. Use some of the words below as sentence starters.
  4. Read the story based on the nurse in the YUNGBLUD video at bottom of this page (in purple) and use it as a model. The target words are in orange.

VOCAB LIST 1:

  1. luminescent (glowing)
  2. kaleidoscopic (multicoloured)
  3. poignant (bringing to mind a sense of sadness or regret)
  4. metamorphic (changed into a new form by great heat and pressure)
  5. sonorous (deep and full)
  6. indomitable (impossible to defeat)
  7. fevered (excessive nervous energy)
  8. ephemeral (lasting for a very short time)
  9. resolute (determined)
  10. illimitable (endless)
  11. balletic (graceful)
  12. anomalous (different to normal)
  13. murmurous (low, indistinct)
  14. empyrean (heavenly)
  15. leaden (heavy; of the colour of grey)
  16. wistful (sad about something past)
  17. calescent (growing warm; increasing in heat)
  18. ineffable (too great for words)
  19. rhapsodic (extravagantly emotional)
  20. ethereal (extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world)

VOCAB LIST 2:

  1. compassionate: showing kindness and a desire to help others who are suffering. 
  2. ethereal: very delicate, light, or airy, almost too perfect for this world. 
  3. irksome: annoying or bothersome. 
  4. gallant: brave, heroic, and polite, especially towards women. 
  5. fickle: changing one’s mind often and not being loyal or consistent. 
  6. candid: being very honest and straightforward. 
  7. naïve: lacking experience or understanding of the world and easily trusting others. 
  8. scrupulous: Very careful to do what is right and honest. 
  9. manipulative: Good at influencing or controlling others in a clever or unfair way. 
  10. dogmatic: stubbornly believing that your opinions are always right and refusing to consider other viewpoints. 

COLOUR WORDS:

The Ward Between Worlds

Leaden fluorescent light lit the emergency ward. Isla moved like a shadow – a figure of balletic grace shaped by repetition and resolve. The night shift had been long and fevered, stitched together by alarms, whispered prayers, and moments too fragile to name. Yet, her steps remained resolute, her presence indomitable, even as weariness clung to her bones like a second skin.

Luminescent monitors flashed in one corner of the ward. A young boy lay unconscious, his face pale. Isla adjusted his oxygen tube with the soft precision of a pianist and the machines murmured. For a fleeting, ephemeral second, the room felt suspended in another realm – half hospital, half dream.

She thought of the song she’d listened to earlier that day, a rhapsodic hymn. Its sonorous refrain still echoed in her memory, wrapping around her like a blanket. There was something poignant in it—something wistful, like the longing for a life before masks and code blues and last goodbyes said through video screens.

A call came. Room seven. Emergency. Isla moved swiftly, a practised rhythm in her steps, each motion shaped by metamorphic experience – formed under the pressure of a thousand desperate nights roaming these labyrinthine corridors, the never-ending maze of doors and more doors. She arrived with hands steady, voice calm, eyes burning with the same fire that had never dimmed. In this chaos, she was not merely surviving – she was transforming.

As the crisis calmed, she returned to the boy’s bedside. Kaleidoscopic dawn arrived. The sky changed. Daylight unfurled behind streaked windows – an ethereal palette painting the end of another night.

Isla stood there for a moment, caught between fatigue and something ineffable. The world outside seemed distant, almost anomalous, as if time in the ICU obeyed its own rules – the never-ending heartbreak like some kind of monster, stalking the hallways.

She touched the boy’s hand gently, her thoughts wandering through every patient she’d held, every breath she’d fought to keep in a failing body. And though it all felt impossibly large, there was comfort in the knowledge that she’d given every part of herself. Not for recognition, but because this was what she was made for.

In that quiet, sacred second, Isla felt the presence of something illimitable – not hope, not sorrow, but the space between; a place only nurses know, where pain and beauty meet, where life balances on a needle’s edge.

And still, she stood. A beacon in the storm. A soul among machines.

Unbreakable.

Human.

ACTIVITY 3

If you want to link today’s class to your Literature studies, make a list of characters whose good work goes largely unnoticed. Do those characters change depending on whether they are in public or private? Support your ideas with evidence from the text.

Once, you’ve finished, you can have have a go at some more YUNGBLUD-inspired activities!