HA'Aki

Iriz Pääbo, Director

Born in Hässleholm, Sweden, Iriz Urve Pääbo is a filmmaker, actor, playwright, composer, illustrator and painter. Iriz has directed, animated, edited and written music for the independent animated films I've Got a Little Brother, My Quills Click when I Walk, Bon Vivant and Wake Up/Wake Up. Her 1991 breakthrough film, Leaving the Poisons Behind, aired nationally in Canada and Australia and screened at festivals in Los Angeles, Leipzig and Uppsala. Tecknicly Inkorect (1996) was broadcast on Teletoon and screened at the prestigious Annecy and Goteborg festivals. A noted visual artist, Iriz has participated in a number of group shows, including the Tom Thompson Gallery, Scarborough Arts Centre, Queen's University and Deleon White Gallery. She has had four solo shows between 1997 and 2000, one at Northrop Frye Hall at the University of Toronto's Victoria University.

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SOUND

All sound was developed in Nuendo software using its Universal Sound Module as a starting point. Individual sounds were layered, doubled, processed, and filtered extensively to create new sounds. Considerable use was made of transposition and pitch envelopes, and all input was directly from the computer keyboard.

Where sound and image were closely connected, their matching took place in Nuendo or in Aftereffects, both of which recognize 32-bit sound and QT preview movies in 480x270 pixels, which was the real-time RAM preview playback standard for the CPU system. Final image was a 1920x1080 QT movie, and the final soundscape was positioned in 5.1 surround sound using Nuendo and home theatre speakers.

IMAGE

Graphics for the hockey rink, arena logos, crowds, and various ice effects were created in Photoshop using the Wacom tablet. The arena was built in 3ds Max, and all proportions and placements of graphics were made according to hockey association specifications for the game.

The hockey players were created and animated one by one in 3ds Max, exported as individual movies with alpha, and afterwards assembled in Aftereffects where they were put through extensive sequences of filters and effects. Additionally, the first and most realistic portrayal of players was created by rotoscoping each 3ds Max player movie using Aura and then placing the images into Aftereffects for further processing.

For some sections, short sequences from various hockey games, (Toronto, Washington, Buffalo among them) were intercut and assembled into movies and used as reference material.

The animbits were created in 3ds Max or Combustion and then sequenced, doubled, layered and filtered in Aftereffects. The resulting QT movies on alpha were often returned for a second or third processing to improve length, colour, or motion dynamics.

The red and white playerblob shapes in the "Zone" sections were created in acrylic paint, scanned, and then processed in Aftereffects to make separate QT movies of each playerblob. These individual movies were pasted to transparent planes in 3ds Max and made to relate to the camera as it travelled around the rink.

First, I wanted to create a film that celebrated the soundscape of a hockey game in a way that was abstract and artistic but would still be of interest to hockey fans.

Secondly, I wanted to show a hockey game from the viewpoint of the observer in the stands as well as that of the player on the ice. Related to this was the wish to express the experience of an athlete being in the "Zone".

Thirdly, I wanted to give body to sound and sound to body in the creation of a vocabulary of "animbits", or short musical animations which could shoot around the visual space in the same way that sound does, and vice versa.