A little video in memory of our recently deceased frilled dragon, Spartacus. He had developed nasty bacterial and fungal infections - the latter stages of which are as gross as they sound (in frilled dragons, at least) - and he had to be put down on Thursday, January 16. Hard as it is for us to believe, he was only four years old. He was such a big presence in our lives during that time that it seemed much longer. For those of you who are wondering, the average lifespan for a frilled dragon in captivity is reported to be somewhere between 7 and 15 years. In any case, he died young. If you're viewing this video, it's probably because at some point you met Spartacus, agreed to look at pictures and/or videos of him, or politely indulged stories about him without effectively communicating just how nuts you thought we were to have such a pet. Whichever group(s) you fall into, we hope he made you smile. He certainly made us smile a lot and we will miss him. Given this, and the fact that he may have been the most recorded and photographed frilled dragon this side of New Guinea (his ancestral homeland), we put together a short tribute to him. The music makes it a little sadder than we intended (more on that below). Our memories of Spartacus are happy ones. Linda and David PS - This is my (David's) first time using Vimeo - embarrassing as that may be - and from what little I can tell, they seem to encourage descriptions with info on the "production" (to use the term very loosely in this case) of the video. so here goes: Just about all (in fact, possibly, all) of the pictures and clips in this video were taken with an iPhone. It was put together using iMovie, with guidance from the book Frilled Dragon Memorial Videos for Dummies. Not surprisingly, picking the music took longer that creating the video itself. I started out wanting to use Morphine's Head With Wings (for obvious reasons) but Linda said she always considered that to be one of the filler songs on Cure For Pain. Who knew? We tried Zola Jesus and Sigur Ros, but couldn't quite land on the right fit. I suggested looking for something by Ornette Coleman (from the original Don Cherry/Charlie Haden era) but Linda ruled out all jazz, as that would've required her to listen to jazz. I retaliated with nothing involving Trent Reznor, so that ruled out half of Linda's music collection. (Just kidding. In Linda's defense, Trent Reznor was never even mentioned.) Also to her credit, Linda didn't divorce me when I suggested Pete Seeger singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight and knew that I was only joking when I played the Shaggs followed by a few seconds of Tony Bennett and KD Lang singing a duet of What a Wonderful World (which is still in my iTunes from when I digitized my parents CD collection for them, I swear). Kristen Hersh's Your Ghost became a front runner for a while, but also didn't seem quite right. Hearing Michael Stipe's backing vocals on Your Ghost led us to briefly consider REM, until we realized that we were actually considering REM. We finally landed on The Ladder by Bright Eyes which, while very sad, really did seem to work. The song is longer than we wanted the video to be (we agreed that making people sit through more than two minutes or so of frilled dragon pictures was asking a lot), so I shortened it using my limited iMovie audio editing skills. Maybe I'm missing something, but I find editing a song in iMovie to be like trying to splice reel-to-reel tape using a serrated knife, crazy glue, and a large wooden mallet. Thus the awkward jump in the song near the beginning of the video. Sorry about that.
