For Dads: What to Film When You’re Terrified and Emotional and Holding a Camera
Someone is going to hand you a phone and say “film this” while your entire world rearranges itself.
Maybe you’ve been planning this for months. Maybe you’ve watched every birth vlog on YouTube. Maybe you bought a gimbal that’s still in the box. None of that matters now.
What matters is this: you are standing in a position that no one else in the room occupies. You are the partner. You are about to become a parent. And the things you see from where you’re standing (your angle, your shaking hands, your breathing) that is the footage your family will watch in ten years and fall apart over.
This isn’t a filmmaking guide. This is a “you’re about to go through the most overwhelming experience of your life and here’s how to capture some of it without missing any of it” guide.
You’re going to do fine.
1. You’re the camera person now, and you don’t need to be good at it
The best birth and newborn footage on the internet is shaky, badly framed, and shot through tears.
Nobody is expecting a documentary from you. Your partner doesn’t need you to find the right angle. Your baby will not care about resolution. What they’ll care about, fifteen years from now, is hearing your voice crack when you say “oh my god” for the first time.
Hold the phone in one hand. Keep the other hand free, for your partner, for the baby, for gripping the side of a hospital bed because your knees are doing something strange. That free hand matters more than any shot.
2. Film her: her face, her strength, her hands
Your partner is doing something extraordinary, and you are the only person in the room who loves her like you do.
That changes what you see. A midwife sees a patient. A doctor sees a procedure. You see the person you chose to build a life with, doing the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Film what you see.
Her hands gripping the bed rail. Her face between contractions when she closes her eyes and goes somewhere you can’t follow. The moment she laughs at something, because there will be a moment like that, even in the chaos.
Keep the camera at her eye level or above. Short clips, ten to twenty seconds each. Don’t narrate. The sounds in the room are the soundtrack. Her breathing, the beeping monitors, the midwife’s calm voice, all of that is part of the story.
And if she’s told you beforehand that she doesn’t want to be filmed during labor, that boundary is absolute. Film the room. Film the clock. Film your own shoes. But respect what she asked for.
3. Film your own reaction: you are part of this story
Flip the camera. Ten seconds. Let your face do whatever it’s doing.
Dads and partners are conditioned to hold it together. To be “the strong one.” To stay calm and steady while everything inside them is detonating. This guide is asking you to do the opposite, just for ten seconds.
When the baby arrives, or when you first hear the cry, or when you look at your partner and realize what just happened, turn the camera around. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to perform. Just let it see you.
Dhar Mann, who has built an empire on emotional storytelling, filmed the moments before meeting his daughter. It wasn’t produced. It was a man sitting in a hospital room, hands clasped, praying quietly. The vulnerability of it is what made it extraordinary.
Your tears are not weakness. They’re evidence. Evidence that you were there, that you felt it, that this moment broke you open in the best possible way. Your kid deserves to see that one day.
4. The first time you hold the baby: hand the phone to someone else
This is the one moment you should NOT be filming.
Give the phone to a nurse, a midwife, your mum, a friend. Anyone. Tell them: “Can you film me when they hand me the baby?” That’s all the instruction they need.
Because you need both hands for this. And you need your eyes on your baby, not on a screen. The footage of you meeting your child for the first time (your face, your arms adjusting, the way you’ll instinctively start swaying even though nobody taught you that) is some of the most important footage that will ever exist of you.
You cannot film this yourself. You should not try. Be in the moment completely.
Khoa from KKandbabyJ has filmed multiple births from the dad’s perspective, and the moments where he hands the camera off and just holds his babies are consistently the most powerful. The camera finds him. He doesn’t need to find it.
5. Skin to skin: your chest, your baby, your moment
When they place your baby on your bare chest, the world shrinks to the size of that warm weight.
If your hospital supports it and the moment comes for you to do skin to skin, ask someone to set up a phone to record. Prop it on a table. Lean it against a water jug. The angle doesn’t matter.
What matters is the footage of you breathing with your baby for the first time. Your hand on their back. The size of them against the size of you. Their fingers curled around nothing.
This is not a photo opportunity. This is a medical and emotional practice that regulates your baby’s heartbeat and temperature. But it’s also the first time your body is saying to another human being: you’re safe with me.
If that footage is blurry or sideways or mostly ceiling, it’s still priceless.
6. The phone calls: the moment the world finds out
Calling your parents to tell them they’re grandparents is a scene that writes itself.
Film the call, not yourself. Hold the phone on speaker and use another device, or prop your phone up, and let it run. The audio is what matters here. The gasps, the crying, the “are you serious?”, the silence that happens when someone is too happy to speak.
If you can only capture audio, that’s enough. If you can film your own face while you make the call, even better. But the call itself, that raw, unscripted, first-time-hearing-the-news reaction from the people who love you, is irreplaceable.
The best friend call at 3am. The sibling who screams. The parent who goes quiet. Film all of them.
Roman Atwood, who documented years of his family life on YouTube, captured these calls in ways that remind you: the ripple effect of a new baby goes far beyond the hospital room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfOrnBlXgdI
7. The hospital hallway: the footage nobody thinks to get
You will pace that hallway. Film it.
At 4am, when you’re walking to the vending machine because labor is long and you don’t know what to do with your hands, take out your phone. Film the empty corridor. The fluorescent lights. The vending machine that charges four dollars for a Kit Kat.
Film yourself in the bathroom mirror. You look terrible. You look exactly like a person who is about to become a parent should look.
Talk to the camera if you want. Say what you’re feeling. Say “I’m terrified” or “this is taking forever” or “I just want her to be okay.” Or say nothing and just show the hallway at an hour when the world is asleep and you are the most awake you have ever been.
Tom Fletcher from McFly understood the power of in-between moments. His creative time-lapse documenting pregnancy and birth works because it captures the waiting, not just the arriving.
This footage will mean more than you think. The story of your baby’s birth isn’t just the birth itself. It’s the hours around it.
8. Protect the moment: when the camera goes down, it goes DOWN
This is the most important section in this guide, and it has nothing to do with filming.
When things get intense, medically, emotionally, or both, the camera goes away. Into a pocket. Into a bag. Off.
If your partner says stop, you stop. If a doctor or midwife tells you the room needs to focus, you focus. If you feel in your gut that this moment is not for a screen, trust that feeling immediately.
No footage is worth your partner feeling documented when they needed to feel held. No clip is worth a medical team working around your phone. No video is worth being in the memory instead of in the moment.
There will be parts of this experience that belong only to the people in the room, in real time, with no record. Those parts are sacred. Let them be.
You can always write down what happened later. You can describe it to the camera after. But you cannot un-film a moment your partner needed to be private.
When in doubt: phone down, hand out, eyes up.
9. The car seat installation panic: a universal dad experience
You’ve watched eleven YouTube tutorials. You’ve practiced in the driveway twice. You will still fumble this in the hospital car park.
Film it. Or better yet, have your partner film you from the back seat. Because the footage of a brand-new parent trying to figure out a car seat buckle with a seven-pound human waiting patiently is the most relatable content in the history of parenthood.
Taylor Calmus (Dude Dad) has built an entire brand around the comedic reality of fatherhood, and moments like this are exactly why. The gap between how prepared you thought you were and how prepared you actually are is where the best footage lives.
[Video embed – Dude Dad/Taylor Calmus “New Dad Moments”]
Your hands will shake. The clip won’t clip. You’ll read the manual in the car park like it’s written in another language. All of it is gold.
10. The drive home: the slowest you’ve ever driven
You have never been this aware of every other car on the road.
You’re going twenty in a forty zone. You’re checking the rearview mirror every three seconds. A speed bump feels like a personal attack.
Set up a phone on the dashboard, safely, before you start driving, and let it run. The footage of you white-knuckling the steering wheel while your partner sits in the back with the baby, and both of you keep turning around to check if the baby is still breathing, is a film in itself.
Don’t film while driving. Set it and forget it. Or ask your partner to film from the back seat: their view of you driving, the baby in the car seat, the streets of your neighbourhood as you bring a new person home for the first time.
Mark Wiens, known globally for his food travel videos, showed a completely different side of himself when he documented becoming a dad. The quiet, personal moments of bringing a new life into his family were a world away from his usual content, and all the more powerful for it.
[Video embed – Mark Wiens “Becoming a Dad”]
11. The first night home: the quiet that changes everything
It’s 3am. The baby is finally asleep. The house is silent in a way it will never be silent again.
Film it.
Film the baby in the bassinet. Film the monitor glowing green. Film your partner passed out at an angle that cannot possibly be comfortable. Film the stack of nappies that looks like it will last a month and will be gone by Thursday.
Film the kitchen. The bottles on the counter. The cards from people who love you. The fridge full of meals someone dropped off.
Then sit down, and film yourself for thirty seconds. Whisper if you have to. Say how you feel. Say “we did it” or “I can’t believe she’s here” or “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Say whatever comes.
This is the footage that will make you cry hardest in ten years. Not the dramatic moments. The quiet ones. The ones where it was just you, awake, watching over your family for the first time.
12. A message to your kid: sixty seconds that will last forever
Sit down. Open the camera. Look into it. Talk to the person who doesn’t know you yet.
This is the most important thing you will film. Not today, not this week, but ever.
Say their name. Say the date. Say: “You were born yesterday, and I’m your dad, and here’s what I want you to know.”
Then say whatever comes. You don’t need a script. You don’t need to be eloquent. Talk about what the weather was like. Talk about what song was playing in the car. Talk about how your partner looked at you when they handed the baby over. Talk about what you’re scared of. Talk about what you hope for.
Sixty seconds. That’s all. One minute of you, talking directly to your child, recorded in the first days of their life.
They will watch this at eighteen, or twenty-one, or on their own wedding day, or when they become a parent themselves. And they will hear your voice, young and tired and overwhelmed and full of something you didn’t even have a word for yet.
Give them that. It costs you one minute.
When to put the camera down
The camera is a tool. It is not your job.
Your job is to be present. To hold a hand. To advocate for your partner when they can’t advocate for themselves. To ask the midwife what’s happening. To say “you’re doing amazing” and mean it. To cry if you need to cry. To be steady if steady is what’s needed.
Here’s when the phone goes away, every time, without exception:
- When your partner asks you to stop filming
- When medical staff need the room’s full attention
- When your partner is in pain and needs your hand, not your documentation
- When you feel yourself watching the moment through a screen instead of through your eyes
- When something feels private, trust that instinct, it’s right
- When you’re needed as a person more than as a camera operator
The footage you don’t capture is not lost. It lives in your memory. And some memories are more valuable without a file attached to them.
Be the partner first. Be the filmmaker a distant second.
The footage only you can get
You are standing where nobody else is standing. That is your advantage.
A photographer can capture the birth from across the room. A midwife can describe what happened clinically. But nobody else can film:
- Your view of your partner’s face during the hardest moment of their life
- The walk from the delivery room to the ward, carrying a car capsule with a person in it who didn’t exist this morning
- Your parents’ reaction on a video call at an hour no one should be awake
- The view from the driver’s seat on the way home, checking the mirror constantly
- The house, quiet and ready, the moment before you carry the baby through the front door
- Your own face, wrecked and radiant, in a bathroom mirror at 5am
This is your angle. Literally and emotionally. No photographer, no matter how talented, can replicate the perspective of the person who helped make this child and is now watching their life begin.
The shaking makes it real. The bad framing makes it honest. The sound of you breathing makes it human.
Your story matters too
Somewhere along the way, partners got the message that birth is something that happens to them rather than with them.
That’s wrong. You are not a spectator. You are not the support crew. You are a parent, becoming a parent, in real time. And your experience of this (the fear, the awe, the helplessness, the love that hits you like a wall) is as valid and important as anyone else’s in that room.
Turn the camera on yourself. Not for content. Not for social media. For your kid.
So they can see that their dad, or their other mum, or their papa, or whatever they’ll call you, was there. Was present. Was falling apart and holding it together and falling apart again.
For same-sex couples, for adoptive parents meeting their child for the first time, for anyone standing in the role of “the other parent,” your footage is not secondary footage. It is half the story. It might be the half your child returns to most.
You were there. Make sure the camera knows it.
Why it matters
You are building an archive of love, and you don’t even know it yet.
Right now it feels like chaos. Like you’re just trying to survive the day and remember which end of the nappy goes where.
But in five years, your kid will find these videos on your phone and ask to watch them again and again. In ten years, they’ll show their friends. In twenty years, they’ll watch them alone, late at night, and understand something about love that no one could have explained to them.
The footage doesn’t need to be good. It needs to exist.
Your voice, saying “she’s here” through tears. Your hand, reaching into a cot at midnight. Your face, in a hospital bathroom, looking like you’ve been awake for forty hours because you have been.
That is the archive. You are building it right now, one shaky ten-second clip at a time.
The bottom line
You don’t need a plan. You don’t need equipment. You don’t need to be good at this.
You need a phone with storage space, a willingness to press record during the overwhelming moments, and the wisdom to put it down when the moment needs you more than it needs documentation.
Film your partner. Film your baby. Film yourself. Film the quiet parts. Film the messy parts. Film a sixty-second message to the tiny person who just changed every single thing about your life.
And when you can’t film, when your hands are full of baby or your eyes are full of tears or your partner needs you right now, let it go. The best moments might be the ones that live only in your memory, unrecorded and unfiltered and completely yours.
You’re going to be a great dad. The fact that you read this far already proves it.
