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n June 11th, the HBO Max original documentary Menudo: Forever Young premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The four-part documentary is also available for stream- ing on HBO Max, beginning June 23rd. Directed By Ángel Manuel Soto (Charm City Kings) and Kristofer Ríos (Havana Skate Days), Menudo: Forever Young chronicles the rise and fall of the famous Latin American boy band. Viewers will get a look at the teen idols' global tours, magazine covers, 1980s outfits and sc eaming fan-girls, but what they might not expect is the revelation that behind the glitz and glamour was a web of abuse and exploitation at the hands of the band's manager, Edgardo Diaz. Through interviews with former Menudo members, the film xamines how an extravagant facade helped dis- guise Diaz's wrongdoings. Carla Roda is one of several editors who worked on the project, but the only one who contributed to all four episodes. She got involved last September, knowing that there would be a tight turnaround to meet the Tribeca premiere and streaming dates. Roda was recommended for the project by another documentary editor — Carla Gutierrez (RBG) — who left shortly after post production began. "She is the editor of a ton of documen- taries — very successful documentaries," Roda says of Gutierrez. "(They wanted) somebody who speaks English and Spanish…She knew me, so she suggest- ed my name, and that's how I became involved. It's a very small world, and what I love about it is woman always help each other through editing jobs." The story of Menudo, the boy band from Puerto Rico, is told through four episodes — the fir t two are 45 minutes long, while Episodes 3 and 4 are a slight- ly shorter 40 minutes each. "We tried to go as chronologically as possible," says Roda of the episodes. "If you are a little bit familiar with the band, by the time they became MDO, I think there [were] 29 members that came in and out, so we tried to tell the story as chronologically as possible. Of course there are moments that we just creat- ed themes or topics, if we want to talk about something specific " Episodes 1 and 2 stay close to the chronological concept, while Episodes 3 and 4 are more theme-based, Roda notes. The band was extremely popular in the '80s and ulti- mately launched Ricky Martin's solo career. That being the case, much of the documen- tary relies on archival footage, which is paired with newly-shot interviews. "We have so much footage, from so many different sources, in so many different qualities, and so many different frame rates," Roda explains. "We started working with whatever was available to us. A lot of it came from television net- works from all over — mostly South America, a lot from Spain too, and even America." Initially, media out- lets weren't paying too much attention to the band's popularity, but when they started sell- ing out major venues, people took notice. "Everybody, all of a sudden was like, 'Wow, there is something here,'" says Roda of the band's stop at Madison Square Garden in New York City. "Then they started actually reporting a lot. So we had a lot of material — NBC, CNN and Fox — and these materi- als are always pretty-good quality." The editing team, working remotely from New York and Los Angeles, em- ployed an Adobe Premiere workfl w. "Every time the archival producer found something new, they would up- loaded it to LucidLink," Roda explains. LucidLink (www.lucidlink.com) is a cloud file ystem delivered as a SaaS solution. "From there, the assistant editor would grab it and convert it into proxies, and then she will send it to me by a program called Aspera. Then I will download it from there, directly to my drive. When I open my project, it will be in there." The editing team worked with proxy videos and watermarked samples up until the online. They also had access to a large collection of still imagery. "We used a lot of pictures actual- ly," Roda recalls. "There [were] a lot of newspapers and even photographers that were following the band from the beginning." The photos ranged in quality and sometimes required a creative solution to achieve a more polished result. "When they are not good quality, we basically passed it to our amazing graph- MENUDO: FOREVER YOUNG BY MARC LOFTUS EDITOR CARLA RODA HELPS DELIVER THIS FOUR-PART DOCUMENTARY O EDITING www.postmagazine.com 14 POST MAY/JUNE 2022 Editor Carla Roda and her Adobe Premiere set up.