By Keith Staskiewicz

Apart from being my favorite deadly sin, Sloth is also the protagonist in Daniel Cardenas’ web series aptly named Sloth. Here’s the third episode, titled Perfecta:

Produced by WonderGlen, a faux internet production company that began as a sprawling inside joke by The Colbert Report writer/producer Ben Karlin and grew from there, the series follows the adventures of its sluggish hero as he is experimented on in an animal testing facility. Cardenas was kind enough to talk to us about his three-toed creation.

KEITH STASKIEWICZ: How did you get started working on Sloth?

DANIEL CARDENAS: I started when I was in school. I did a sloth short because I always thought sloths were really funny. It was the thing I worked on the least but I showed it around and everyone liked it a lot. Then I did these 30 second spots on MTV 2, and after that I pitched the idea to WonderGlen.

KEITH: WonderGlen has an interesting format, as a sort-of fake-real production company. How did you get involved with them?

DANIEL: I got referred to them a long time ago. I was going to do some animation work on stuff that they had already written, but that fell through so they asked me if I had any ideas. I pitched them a bunch of things and they liked Sloth. The WonderGlen guys like to push the jokes to get the most out of them, so they usually come back to me with changes to make to the animatic.

KEITH: I love the Sloth logo.

DANIEL: Thanks.

KEITH: Your show seems really marketable in a Paul Frank sort of way, and I noticed that Lance Freeman, the character in your online comic strip, is a graphic designer. Do you have a lot of experience in that field?

DANIEL: I started out in that field. I started at 16 doing flyers and stuff like that and then kept doing it. It paid for the majority of my schooling. I only really started commercializing my animation stuff after I started working at a motion graphics company called Panoptic. I designed the logo for Slothvision, and I think that Sloth through the nature of who he is, as a constantly changing figure, could be interesting as a marketing tool. I could see Slothvision as a brand. It has some sort of recognition from the animal, at least. People always say, “I love sloths.” I actually have a website address that people can remember, and that’s not something that’s that easy to get.

KEITH: Are there any plans to move this off the web to another medium, like TV?

DANIEL: I’d definitely be open to it. If it went to TV, the characters would have to start talking, because right now it doesn’t have any dialogue. But I definitely think there’s enough to maintain a full show. There’s stuff we could do with the hippies that come to rescue him in the second episode. They’re already going to be back in the fourth episode to try to rescue him again.

KEITH: Who works on the show besides you?

DANIEL: I have an animator that helps me on the in-betweens named Henry Thurlow. He’s helped me on the past three episodes and the upcoming one. The next one after that, I think it might just be me doing it. That’s why it takes so long to make them, it’s pretty much just me sitting at the Wacom for hours. It usually takes like a month to do the boards and the animatic and two weeks or so to animate it.

KEITH What else are you working on?

DANIEL: I have a pilot script and a show bible for a show about hoboes. Do you know about the 700 Hoboes Project?

KEITH: No, what is it?

DANIEL: It’s from this book by John Hodgman. He has 700 names for hoboes and people started drawing them. I contributed a few to a Flickr group and it grew into this idea for a show. I’m working on a mini-comic as well, sort of like a 12-13 page mini-comic about my brother tricking me into thinking that there’s a magical dimension.

KEITH: If you were to do another Sloth-type project, but with another animal, what animal would you pick?

DANIEL: I like lemurs, they seem like jerks. They just look like assholes, I don’t know why. So I think that a bunch of dick lemurs would be pretty interesting.

Formerly a writer for shows that have appeared on Nicktoons, Cartoon Network and AOL, Keith Staskiewicz is currently a student at the Columbia School of Journalism where he is working on an animation-oriented Master’s thesis.