#old buck

So by now most of you are probably aware of the short film Old Buck by David Armsby (AKA Dead Sound) that came out today and has singlehanded become one of the best pieces of dinosaur media I have ever seen in my life. I haven’t really done a review-format-type-thing before but this really make me want to give it a shot. So, in advance, my short review is that this film is absolutely incredible, and you should all go and watch it a million times over like I have. Now, to say that in a much more long-winded way!

I’ve been a fan of Dead Sound for years, ever since I was introduced to his first dinosaur short Sharp Teeth, which is the precursor to this series in a lot of ways. I’m also a huge fan of his Autodale series, set in a dark retrofuturistic dystopian world, that slowly uncovers the mechanisms behind why the world is the way it is and who is secretly pulling the strings.

Old Buck tonally and visually feels like a direct successor to Sharp Teeth, exploring similar themes and being presented in a similar way, but as great as Sharp Teeth is I feel like Old Buck is in every way more mature and superior to its predecessor.

Visually the film is absolutely spectacular. I’m always a complete sucker for a limited colour palette and the blues and greys and pinks that Armsby has chosen are stunning. Trans Rights Styracosaurus is beautiful and I love it. His modelling and texturing of the animals has gotten more and more detailed over the years he’s been making films, but they still retain a lovely simplicity and stylisation that works fantastically with the unshaded flat coloured style.

The dinosaurs are, simply put, absolutely top notch. These are unreservedly the best dinosaurs I have ever seen on film. The protagonist Old Buck is absolutely overflowing with character without ever being overly anthropomorphised, with the broken horn, plant-matted horns and scars making him feel old and weathered and worn but still full of strength and steel. 

I genuinely tried to come up with enough nitpicks to fill a paragraph in this review and I do not have enough! That is just how well Armsby has done his research, and while there’s a couple things I personally might have done differently that is 100% an art style thing, and has nothing to do with accuracy or scientific validity. Just,,, wow these dinosaurs are so good.

There’s also some wonderful variation between members of the same species in the Styracosaurus, with different arrangements and forms of horn and different colour patterns, which must have been so much extra work to put in but it’s so worth it. It makes them feel like a group of individual and varied animals.

The way that the dinosaurs are treated within the frame of the story is fantastic too, and it’s one of my favourite things about Armsby’s work in general. He often includes running themes of nature being neither benevolent nor malevolent, that there are no heroes or villains in nature, simply animals trying to survive. The Old Buck is our protagonist, but he is not the Hero. The rival male is the antagonist who opposes the Old Buck, but he is not the Villain, nor are the Daspletosaurus that watch from the sidelines.

Another thing I absolutely love is the decision to not have any narration. Sharp Teeth had a poem as narration, and while that poem is great I think removing any narration for Old Buck was absolutely the right choice to make. It lets the visual storytelling stand on its own, and that visual storytelling is lovely. I particularly like the part where the rival male uses the same move on his first opponent and on the Old Buck, but when he attempts to use it a third time Old Buck has learned from it and changes his strategy, turning the tide of the fight. That’s the kind of thing that could have been made blatantly obvious with narration, but the visuals are strong enough that they do not need it and the film is absolutely better for that!

Speaking of visuals, I’m just gonna end this review off with some of the absolutely stunning cinematography and composition in this short because if me gushing about it for 700 words hasn’t convinced you to watch it then you should at least see how insanely pretty this film is. This was all made by one person by the way.

David Armsby is the paleoartist behind the short film Old Buck (the first of his WIP Dinosauria series, available here), which focuses on a herd of Styracosaurus albertensis. 

(Still directly from short film)

In David’s Making Of video, he explains that this choice of dinosaur was inspired by a particular fossil specimen of the same species, notable in that the rack of horns at the top of her frill was asymmetrical. This specimen, named UALVP55900 or, alternatively, Hannah, brought up a lot of questions about the classification of previous fossils - multiple other specimens have been named as different species due to different numbers or arrangements of horns, but this discovery raised the possibility that they could have all been natural variations of the same species.

The film references the theory that one of the previous specimens put into question was an extreme morph of the albertensis genus. The horns of the main character are directly based off of this specimen, and careful watchers will be able to spot the member of the herd with Hannah’s horn morph as well. 

(Diagram of Hannah)

Old Buck was extremely successful in paleo-scientific circles due to its accuracy - and the fact that David acknowledges and readily points out any inaccuracies included for storytelling purposes. Because of this, it made its way all the way back to the scientists at the University of Alberta, where Hannah is being studied. And...