An East Lancashire filmmaker has produced a short video to honour the 'heroes working hard for the country'.

Natasha Hawthornthwaite from Darwen, who runs Northern Heart Films, produced A Kingdom United from her home in Wigan, using archived images, and footage she filmed while out in the car with her partner and poet, Carla Mellor.

Miss Mellor's poem and voice-over also feature on the short film, which was made in reaction to the coronavirus crisis lockdown.

Miss Hawthornthwaite, a former Darwen Aldridge Community Academy student, said: "I've been left unable to work much since we went into lockdown, so I decided to utilise mine and Carla's skills to try and make a film without any social contact whatsoever.

"We recorded the poem at home and used archive images provided to us by Mirrorpix as visuals.

"We also shot a couple of shots through the car window in Wigan town centre to show the impact of the virus."

The 27-year-old, whose business partners Scott Bradley and Mark Roscoe worked on the production with her, said the film had been well received so far and had amassed more than 4,000 organic shares on their social media platforms.

Miss Hawthornthwaite continued: "I really enjoyed making the film and felt passionate about it right from the beginning.

"After Boris Johnson's announcement last week, it felt impossible to make a film without any social contact but I’m so proud that we’ve managed to make it work.

"It’s amazing that we went from having nothing to now producing a film with a really powerful message.

"It just goes to show how we can utilise archive imagery to get strong messages across.

"I hope our NHS, supermarket staff and those important key workers see the film as they’re doing a stellar job in these uncertain times.

"I’d really like to give our nation a sense of hope and a feeling of uniting as a country."

Despite feeling overwhelmed by the situation with Covid-19, Miss Mellor believes as a society, the UK is inherently nice.

She said: "It's lovely to hear all these stories about people knocking on the doors of their neighbours asking if they need help.

"We've started to see a nicer side to humanity.

"It's the ordinary person who's the hero now as the situation has placed an importance on jobs that some would previously have looked down on.

"So we thought it only right for people who do those jobs to get the recognition they deserve.

"We just wanted to do something to say thank you to those out there who are keeping us safe and keeping the country going. They are the true heroes."

The full video can be viewed here