A day in the life of a 'castells' climber earns two minutes of YouTube fame

Eight from 80,000. That's 0.01 percent of all those who took part. But eight Spaniards are listed as co-directors of Life in a Day, a project designed to show what happened around the world on July 24, 2010.

The project was created by YouTube last summer, and attracted the involvement of people from 192 countries, who sent more than 80,000 clips to the video-sharing site. That was a total of 4,500 hours of images, which Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of The Last King of Scotland, had to edit down in an effort to show 24 hours of life in the world in just 90 minutes. Ridley Scott's production company, Scott Free UK, is behind the resulting film, Life in a Day.

In the end, images from 331 videos were used, including a Korean who has spent nine years traveling the world on a bicycle, a young mother who is battling with cancer, and a young athlete from Moscow whose lack of proper equipment forces her to use the streets to train.

There are also eight Spanish videos in the film. Alberta Álvarez, from Galicia, confesses her fears that she will never be a mother; Alejandro Romero, from Zaragoza, provides a short called Lorena wakes up. The folklore of the correfuegos - the "devil dancer" tradition from Barcelona - is the chosen theme of Daniel Mas, while Javier de Lara, from Cádiz, created a story in which all the viewer sees are feet. Sócrates Cuadri, meanwhile, created a film that followed a group of youngsters in Seville as they dived off the Triana bridge into the river below.

The only participants missing from that list are Patricia Martínez and Toniu Xou, who were the only Spaniards invited to attend the premiere of the film on January 27 at the Sundance Festival, in the United States. Their film shows the life of young Virginia Segú, who is charged with climbing to the top of the castells, the traditional Catalan human towers that UNESCO recently designated one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

"In the rules for the project they said they wanted to capture the everyday things from life, but we figured that what they were really looking for were unique and curious things," says Martínez. "That's why we thought of the life of a girl who climbs up to the top of the castells."

Martínez, from Barcelona, and Xou, from Mallorca, had already created a program about the castells for Channel 33 in Catalonia. "The most difficult thing was to find an event on July 24, given that we were obliged to shoot on that day."

That was the job of Patricia, who has a Humanities degree but has spent her professional life working in production. The shooting of the video was the job of Toniu Xou, who grew up working at the Mallorca producer La Periférica. "I currently work in advertising and television, both for the Catalan and Mallorcan channels," he explains.

Xou and Martínez decided to give the history of the young girl, Virginia, a bit of an eccentric touch. "We've turned her into a kind of Amélie or Matilda type," explains Martínez. "A solitary girl who does strange things, who goes out on to the street wearing a crash helmet and whose favorite food is a chorizo sandwich."

In the two minutes of the film, Virginia appears leaving an apartment via the balcony before scaling some scaffolding. Then they fix a camera to her helmet, allowing the viewer to see the tension in her eyes as she climbs on the shoulders of her colleagues.

Since they sent the video, they have received three letters from YouTube. "The first was to tell us that we had been chosen, the second to ask us about the music rights, and the third to invite us to Sundance," explains Martínez.

"It's been a great gift for Three Kings Day," adds Xou, who is currently in Mallorca working on a documentary about the life of the banker Juan March.

"Thanks to the skill, depth and generosity of so many participants," says Macdonald, "we have been able to produce a coherent and emotionally attractive film, which gives us an idea of what it meant to be alive on July 24, 2010."