RESEARCH - Britain In A Day

On Saturday 12th November 2011, an eclectic range of British people turned the camera on themselves, capturing the entertaining and mundane, the exciting and the unusual, the poignant and the everyday. The result; Britain In A Day tells the fascinating story of the British public in their own words. Following on from feature film 'Life In A Day', the film directed by BAFTA-winning Morgan Matthews offers an extraordinarily candid look at 21st Century life across the UK, crafted from over 750 hours of footage, including 11,526 clips submitted to YouTube. The documentary offers remarkable insight into the lives, loves, fears and hopes of people living in Britain today. This captivating self-portrait of Britain forms part of the BBC's Cultural Olympiad. Film-maker Morgan Matthews is explaining why more than 11,000 British men and women responded to a call by the BBC to pick up a camera, record what the were doing or feeling that day, and then upload the footage onto youTube. Some of the clips lasted 10 seconds, others 2 hours; edited, curated and whittled down into a 90-minute documentary. They offer a fascinating, sometimes affecting, often funny snapshot of this country. Morgan Matthews is an English, factual director. He is the founder of Minnow Films and has won many awards, including a BAFTA for his documentary 'The Fallen'. 'Britain In A Day' is a follow-up to last year's Kevin MacDonalds-directed, Ridley Scott-produced 'Life In A Day', which was assembled from clips captured across the world the previous July. Its structure is similar, but tonally it veers away from the global humanism that pervaded its predecessor. "If there's a message you take away from Life In A Day, it's that we're all different, but essentially, we're all the same" says Matthews. "Because it offered a very broad canvas, it made it difficult to capture what was going on in the world at any one time. I hope my film captures the zeitgeist, a moment in time that's quite specific"