Case Study: Asaf and Tomer Hanuka
Occupation: Illustrators
Gear: Power Mac G5, Dual-core Intel Mac Pro, Apple Cinema Displays, Wacom pen tablet, Adobe Creative Suite 3
Tomer Hanuka (shown at left working in his New York studio) is 5 minutes older than his twin brother, Asaf (right), who's based in Tel Aviv.
Environment informs imagination; imagination informs art. And then Macs help artists realize--and sometimes even influence--the entire creative cycle.
For twin brothers Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, growing up amid the earthy palette of sun-bleached Israel spurred a longing for more colorful environs. The twins say they became hooked on the supersaturated hues and fantasy worlds of comic books (“We lived in those panels,” says Tomer), and thus two careers in illustration were set in motion.
“We took a hermetic childhood of drawing together in the same bedroom, on the same desk, and sometimes on the same piece of paper,” says Tomer, “and in our 20s went toward very different, even opposing, destinies--trying to define ourselves through a personal aesthetic that was individual and independent of the other.” Tomer now lives and works in New York. Asaf is based in Tel Aviv.
The brothers reunited artistically when they were recruited by a longtime friend, art director David Polonsky, to join the team of illustrators working on Waltz with Bashir. This Golden Globe–winning movie is the work of filmmaker Ari Folman, who, as a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, witnessed the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, Lebanon, in which 3,000 Palestinian refugees were killed. Waltz with Bashir is an animated documentary based on Folman’s own memories--many of which were so traumatic that he discovered years later he couldn’t fully remember them until hearing the experiences of others who were there.
In this scene from Waltz with Bashir, illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, an Israeli soldier steers a tank down a narrow street in a Lebanese village.
Asaf, Tomer, and other artists were assigned storyboards of Folman’s memories to illustrate. Each chose a key event from each storyboard and turned it into an illustration, making sure every visual element was on its own layer in Photoshop. “The animation department traced these elements into Flash in order to animate them,” Asaf explains. “These elements were later posted on the background illustration in After Effects, and that’s how the animation was created.”
The end results are realistic but painterly. Indeed, many people assume the film was created using a technique called rotoscoping, in which live action is filmed and then traced over by hand, frame by frame, to create the animation.
Not so. All of the film’s characters were hand-drawn, and the drawings were created based on real people or fictional composites of real people, including Folman himself. Folman interviewed his subjects in a sound studio, and then the art for the film was created based on that footage. “The illustrators and animators were inspired by the look and body language of the interviewees, but there was no tracing involved,” Asaf says. “The problem with rotoscoping is that once you trace a photo, you get all the information, even what you don’t need--and the whole idea of drawing is about filtering the reality in order to make a statement about it.”
In this scene from the film, illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, a boy visits a carnival with his dad. "The scene works as a metaphor for how memory works," Asaf says. "I made all the elements look like they were invented from the boy's memory by saturating the colors to an eye candy level while 'planting' some scary elements."
Though they started drawing with pencil on paper as 3-year-olds, today the Hanukas also use Macs loaded with Adobe Creative Suite 3, with assists from other traditional and digital tools, such as Wacom pen tablets.
The brothers may look identical, but their methods for getting an art concept from their heads into their Macs are not.
“I tend to change my method according to the work,” says Asaf. “For Waltz with Bashir, I created the illustrations entirely on the computer, because textures were a big part of the final image. I started out with a general sketch--done with the Wacom--and then started pasting pieces of photos and textures, and added digital painting on top of it to create a unified look.”
Tomer’s process is slightly more retro. “I draw with pencil on paper, transfer the drawing to a Bristol board using a light box, and ink it with a brush,” he says. After inking, he then scans the drawing into Photoshop CS3 and colors it onscreen.
Tomer Hanuka created this illustration for the cover of the 2006 book, Marquis De Sade: Philosophy in the Boudoir.
The brothers say that one of the key reasons they favor Macs in their work is the color fidelity they can achieve. “More of my work goes to print, and I need my screen to be as close as possible to real print color,” says Asaf. “Macs are known for being reliable in that area.”
Though he started using PCs right out of art school because they were cheaper, Tomer says once he was able to afford it, he made the switch. “I walked into the Apple Store in SOHO and asked for the biggest, fastest machine they had,“ he says. “The accuracy of colors, from monitor to print, is just priceless and eliminates the anxiety of not knowing how your art will look once it leaves your machine.”
Neither Hanuka uses any external hardware or software calibration tools to keep the colors on their tower Mac–based setups true.
“Apple did a very good job hiding the fact that the Mac is actually a computer,” says Asaf. “I want to forget I’m working on a machine and concentrate on creating. The Mac is the only computer that can give me that.”
Watch the trailer for Waltz with Bashir at www.waltzwithbashir.com. See more of Asaf’s work at www.asafhanuka.com and Tomer’s at www.thanuka.com.
