Glenn Garland ACE and Joel Salazar use ClearView Flex to cut indie feature for director Lorena Villarreal

With credits that include Rob Zombie's Halloween and King of California, the series Preacher, The Vampire Diaries, and Rian Johnson's Poker Face among many others, Glenn Garland ACE is an established Hollywood editor who has also achieved wider renowned for his podcast ‘Editors on Editing’ for American Cinema Editors.

Glenn Garland’s Hollywood Legacy and Collaborations

Garland’s longtime assistant and now editor in his own right is Joel Salazar (Red Camaro). Together they had worked on projects including Silencio (2018) the sophomore feature of Mexican filmmaker Lorena Villarreal. Their current project is Villarreal’s follow-up, the Spanish language drama with the working title La Vida Es, which Salazar is editing and Garland is executive producing.

It also marks the first time that have worked with ClearView Flex, our video collaboration software.“We're on it all day. It's very robust, and frankly I’m not sure we could have made this movie without it,” says Salazar. “And believe me I have tried all the alternatives.”

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Using ClearView Flex for Remote Editing

Salazar was on location in Baja California, Mexico for the shoot. Among other duties he helped get feedback on a number of single shot ‘oners’ filmed for the drama. Now back at his edit bay in Los Angeles he is working on the director’s cut while Villarreal is remote.

“Lorena is often busy in another state or in Mexico which is where ClearView comes into its own,” he says “We connect over Google Meet to talk while using Sohonet to make cuts on the fly. She loves it too and because it’s browser-based she will use ClearView tools to annotate on screen.”

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Challenges of Remote Collaboration and How ClearView Flex Solved Them

“I remember a time when everyone said that editing could never be done remotely. Then the pandemic happened and I feel like it sort of forced everyone to solutions. I worked on shows in the early parts of the pandemic where we used the studio’s corporate Zoom which had a lot of delay in the stream. That was very frustrating. Other solutions require third party software and can be very clunky but Sohonet has really streamlined the whole workflow.

”Garland adds, “We definitely needed a remote editing tool for this particular project because the director was not going to be able to sit with Joel in the room. That was one issue and another was that Lorena is in many different locations, not always with the best internet connection. So, we needed a system that was powerful enough to work no matter where she was.

“You know what? ClearView has been a dream. There is no latency, which is obviously fantastic. Without dropouts, without stuttering or any of the other irritations that you get with some of the other systems.”

Salazar’s Use of AI for Voiceover Narration in the Editing Process

Intriguingly, Salazar has used the AI text-to-speech tool from ElevenLabs to generate a voiceover narration as a placeholder before ADR.

“What’s great is that I can switch from the Avid to the AI app and show Lorena the browser of the AI voice generator on ClearView,” he says. “The AI is just a template,and it will take five or six or seven times for it to kick out one that she likes but because we’re using ClearView she is able to tell me what she likes or doesn’t like inthe voiceover and I can tweak the AI and in seconds we have a refined version.”

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Garland and Salazar’s Ongoing Partnership with Director Lorena Villarreal

Garland explains how the project came about. “It was such a great experience working with Lorena on Silencio. She is really talented. We kept in touch and when this project came up, I thought it was such a beautiful script that I wanted to be a part of it and help her make it.

“Joel is very talented in his own right and I thought this would be a perfect film for him to cut. I’m supervising editor as well as executive producer so I’ve been watching dailies and giving notes on the cuts that Lorena and Joel have done.

“Given our experience on this project, I’d definitely use ClearView again. It has worked brilliantly. I feel like it's an extremely useful tool for any time you're doing remote editing because it's so robust. It just works.”

La Vida Es is being prepped for screenings at next year’s festival circuit.

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