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TONY ALDERSON
Stereo Caricaturist
1954 - October 22, 2002
By Ray Zone
At 48 years of age, Tony Alderson, stereographer, cartoonist, and voluminous correspondent on photo-3D has passed away. Succumbing to liver and kidney failure in North Hollywood, California at 10:30 pm on Tuesday night, October 22, Tony went to the great 3-D drawing table in the sky.
Hired to work at 3D Video Corporation in 1982, Tony converted Jack Kirby's art to 3-D for the "3D Cosmic" book Battle for a Three Dimensional World. He also created numerous stereo conversions, including one for a Friday the 13th Part 3 poster in 3-D that has since become highly collectible.
Tony is the artist responsible for the National Stereoscopic Association (NSA) 2002 Convention logo and he also created the logo in 1986, the last time the convention was held in Riverside, California. The new logo was a gorgeous computer-generated montage combining the classic Holmes stereoscope, Sir Charles Wheatstone, and a Keystone motif with some California oranges and blossoms. The 1986 logo, with deft line art rendered into 3-D, combined the Keystone motif and a stereoscope which held an actual stereo pair showing palm trees, another symbol of Southern California.
Before leaving 3D Video Corporation in 1983, Tony produced the 3-D
conversions for the Topps Jaws 3-D gum trading cards. He wrote an
interesting "3-D bible" for the artists at Topps and it contains some clear observations about stereoscopic fundamentals for neophytes. "In the 3-D conversion process," Tony wrote, "I take the drawing you supply me as the left image. I then simulate the right image by cutting apart copies of the drawing and reassembling them with the proper displacements to create retinal disparities when viewed." Tony always wrote about stereography with great clarity.
After leaving 3D Video Corporation in 1983, Tony began working in motion pictures creating special effects for films like Metalstorm 3-D for which he did stereoscopic rotoscoping. At the same time he served as President of the Stereo Club of Southern California (SCSC) from 1984 to 1985 and its Program Director in 1986-87.
Tony's monthly covers for SCSC's 3-D News during his term as President were witty stereo-delights. His inaugural page was a side-by-side 3-panel "freevision" stereographic cartoon showing him blasted out of a cannon straight at the reader. For his final cover Tony produced the very first anaglyph issue of the 3D News. It featured a self-caricature and a visual joke about the "stereo" window.
Over the years Tony produced stereo conversions for such 3-D comic books as Sheena 3-D, Spirit Classics in 3-D, The Rocketeer, Spacehawk 3-D, Dracula 3-D and 3-Dementia Comics which reprinted one of Tony's great humorous inventions from 1985.
"Noble crusade or cynical scam?" queried Tony who depicted himself as a
hapless cartoonist fleeing a demonic cyclopean business man whose pockets overflow with cash. The comic was 3D Zomoid Illustories, the world's first to be published "in the miracle of FREEVISION." The narrow, vertical side-by-side cartoon panels related "The Nightmare of 3-D Jonestown" and was a thinly veiled and very humorous expose of the rise and fall of the 3D Video Corporation.
During his twenty-year career as a stereographer, Tony used NASA satellite telemetry to produce computer-generated anaglyph movie "fly-throughs" of Yosemite and Venus for a 3-D CD-ROM project. He also created numerous gray-scale depth-map stereo conversions for two different series of Star Wars lenticular 3-D trading cards. Tony wrote numerous articles on stereography for magazines such as Stereoscopy, published by the International Stereoscopic Union (ISU), the March 1993 issue of which includes his essay "An Introduction to 3-D Computing."
Tony worked on many film and TV projects with his business partner Frank Isaacs at the AI (Alderson-Isaacs) Effects company which they co-founded together in 1994. They both recently won Emmy awards for their special effects on "Dune" which premiered on the Sci-Fi cable channel in December 2001.
Though he has many stereographic accomplishments, I always thought of Tony Alderson as a stereo caricaturist, poking devastating humor at himself and the highly competitive world of 3-D business. As a kind of prescient finale to his stereographic work, Tony presented a slide program which was a career overview titled "Make Those Lenses Swing" at the NSA 2002 Convention.
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