Pablo Cervera · Barn A’Bee: A Very Sloth Tale
Slow and steady leaves you jobless
A wool sloth. A cardboard city. A world that never sloths down.
The faster life goes, the more one struggles to catch up.
So I gave a sloth a job. And another. And another. Jobs in a world that needs deliverables yesterday to a character that can’t circle a deadline on a calendar before it flies by.
Musician. Construction worker. Barista. Barnaby goes through life wanting only one thing: to put food on the table for his beloved wife, Prudence.
To tell this sluggishly cute story, I needed a clash of visuals and underlying feelings: wool and cardboard, hope and dread. I told the agent that Barnaby was trying to find purpose in a world that wouldn’t slow down for him.
It all began with the art. We needed a texture that felt simple, to reflect Barnaby’s core lifestyle, and unique. We tried needle-felted wool, then mixed media. When I landed on wool animals in a paper-and-cardboard city, I knew I had my style locked.
The scene that sparked the story
One perfectly synchronized orchestra. Except for a sloth so out of cue that he only plays once everyone’s gone.
Alas, there’s a turtle to witness the genius no one else has the patience to see.
There are a lot of ways for that joke to go wrong: the violin case disappeared between shots, wrong seat order, wrong animals, wrong consistency. And if Barnaby moves at everyone else’s speed, we lose the scene entirely.
The key to unlock the most important scene? Well… Key frames. Absurd’s character references held the mouse, the turtle and Barnaby, while the scene blocks held the shots we needed to cut together. I could point to a specific frame and say: this is where he left the case. It needs to stay there.
Oh agent, my agent
Like Barnaby and Prudence, a healthy relationship is based on communication and ground rules. I chose Seedance, 1080p, and a 16:9 frame, and baked it into the project rules. I also asked the agent to give me multiple-choice questions. When it asked about the camera, duration, sound, and action before a generation, I could answer quickly without rewriting the whole scene.
My brain, like Barnaby’s, has a hard time keeping track of all my tasks. Fortunately, the agent keeps my running tasks updated. Once a shot is ready, it takes me to its location, wherever that is in the canvas according to how I chose to personalize it, to review.
Two tyres, please
A moving car, four wheels to change, four characters in motion, eight wheels in total.
A lot of moving parts can be tricky, especially if those parts look the same and have to swap places. I got specific with the prompt, trying to keep consistency in actions and timing. After all, a good F1 crew swaps tyres fast and in sync.
I almost got it right, but on the tyre switch, both wheels collapsed into one object. I asked for new key frames with the two wheels kept apart: Barnaby holds the used one; the replacement waits beside him.
I asked the agent to work through the pit crew in separate blocks. For each animal, we needed the wheel still on the car, the old wheel coming off, and the replacement going on. I could select those images, discuss their order in the chat, and hold off on animation until the sequence made sense.
Overcooked!
Some images had been through too many edits. I called them “cooked”. I asked the agent how they had been prompted so we could rebuild them from the original reference, keeping the composition I liked. Prompting from a freshly made reference made a world of difference, maximizing image quality and control.
Accept and reject helped me mark the work, but a rejection didn’t always mean something was bad. Later, in the prison scene, I rejected images I liked because I’d changed my mind about the mouse’s props. I was also able to easily go through all rejected versions of the mouse, searching for options I might’ve dismissed too soon.
Timing makes the joke
After Prudence bails Barnaby out, they walk home holding hands. A storm arrives, she starts opening her umbrella, and by the time it pops open, the rain has finished.
To get the joke right, I needed to go full Hitchcock. I broke the timing down for the agent: three seconds walking, rain from seconds three to ten, the umbrella opening at twelve. They stand still while she struggles with it. It turns out that going out with an umbrella as a sloth is purely decorative: they’ll never get to open it in time.
The timing was perfect!
…But the rain looked weird. It looked like it was falling out of the street lamps, rather than the sky. I asked the agent to keep the shot but to rework the rain, preserving the awkward wait before that umbrella finally opened.
Production and post, back and forth
I edit outside Absurd, in DaVinci Resolve. While I run generations, I like to test clips on my first assembly, working through rhythm and consistency at first glance. This not only solidifies the production process, but it sparks my imagination.
That scene that would’ve been fantastic that you only thought of in post? Well… I simply went back to the canvas, and… made it. This allowed me to find the right pacing and shots between the prison cell and the final sequence.
I must admit, my organization skills could use some help. My therapist would argue that having a tool that easily navigates through my mess won’t help me get my stuff together. That’s why I don’t go to therapy anymore. I’ll work on my soft skills later. For now, every lost clip, every time I test a shot, hate it, delete it, all before actually loving it and wanting it back on my edit, I have the agent. A simple description search and the agent pulls exactly what clip I’m talking about, so I can re-download and fit it into DaVinci’s missing media.
For the music, I wasn’t sure how to talk to Suno to get things right. So I talked to the Absurd agent first. What’s the right tone? What does this score feel like? Which parts need more emotion? Which parts need silence?
I gave the agent my first cut without music, and started talking. The avocado sequence needed thirty seconds to follow Barnaby through the market, with a cut to Barnaby’s imagination in the middle, a key trigger for Barnaby to steal an avocado. Then, nine seconds of guilt when he found the police waiting. I asked the agent for a score brief with those exact turns, and took it into Suno.
The dolly climax
During this cute (but inherently slow) story, the camera only moves two times. First, when we move into prison, a big shift in tone, allowing Barnaby to hit rock bottom. Second, at the climax: Barnaby might be oblivious to his strengths, but the finale dolly allows the audience to step back and watch Barnaby at his best: standing absolutely still, as we discover an art student sketching him.
The dolly was tricky. I needed space consistency in a fictional world built entirely of cardboard. I tried dolly waypoints, checked the columns, tested coloured windows, and went back to the room design. But I was trying to control too many elements. I had to trust the agent more.
One starting key frame and a specific prompt: character feelings, tempo, camera movement, the window, the light, the colors, and the vital information we discover as the camera pulls back.
I needed the focus to stay on Barnaby the whole way, and only rack focus to the cat once the dolly ended. He doesn’t realise he’s being sketched; his ability to slow down for the beauty of the world remains an unknown mystery.
A title card that honors the slothness
For the title card, I wanted the fast-paced characters we’ve met to carry in the letters. The orchestra director hangs the sign. An incomplete title card reads “Bar_ A’Bee”. Bar A’Bee? Barbie? And fashionably late, the only way he can do things, Barnaby comes in with the missing “n”, completing his name and the movie’s title.