Syfy is constantly pushing the envelope in terms of creative new series and continuing in line with their unique reality series, this coming March we’ll be introduced to Monster Man and the man behind the madness, Cleve Hall, and his family and friends.

Monster Man chronicles the life of this unconventional family with an unconventional family business: making monsters. When studios want a bizarre creature, they turn to Cleve and his workshop, which is run by his daughters Constance and Elora, his ex-wife Sonja and his best friends Roy Knyrim and Johnny Saiko.

While out at the Syfy Digital Press Tour, we were able to get the news firsthand of what to expect from this out-of-the-box docuseries from Cleve, Constance Hall and Roy Knyrim.

So how did this show about horror-spun makeup effects come to be? Well, the story is an atypical one, for sure.

“Well, I’ve always been a firm believer of being in the right place at the right time,” Cleve began his explanation. “Roy called me at midnight one night, and production needed the back of a huge whale for a shoot for a reality show about animals that attack.  So I’m like, ‘Okay.’ I’m out at a nightclub, and so, about 2:30, the club closes.  I went back to the shop and made it.”

“6:30 rolls around, and I tried to put it in my hearse, and I can’t fit it in my hearse,” Cleve continues. “So I strapped it to the top of the hearse.  And I get out, makeup smeared, and I’m covered in latex.  And I said, ‘Who is this?’  And they just thought that was hilarious.  They said, ‘We are doing a reality show about you.’  And I’m like, ‘Yeah, right.’  And they did.”

So the series tells the story of a real workshop run by a real family. This is sure to make for an interesting dynamic, particularly between Cleve and Constance, who have been working together for ten years, since she was 13. So there was plenty of insight the two could share on their relationship.

“Sometimes we get along and, you know, like, work perfectly, you know, like a well-oiled machine, and sometimes we don’t,” Constance admitted. “Sometimes it’s a little more difficult, you know.”

“Like, I get really, really focused on creating these things, and a lot of it I do in my head, build in my head,” Cleve jumped in. “And I’m staring at the foam and stuff, and she’s just like, ‘Come on.’  I have my way of doing it, and then she starts to work on it.  And I say, ‘Don’t do that.  That’s not the way I want it.’ Yeah.”

But that also makes for some surprises for the both of them to see what they can each end up creating. “Actually, she does some of the things that when I don’t — when I don’t do the project, I run — like, totally stay away from making it and she does it herself, it’s awesome, you know,” Cleve added. “If she’s working with me, sometimes then she’ll rely on my skills and stuff to kind of to show her what to do.  But if I just pretended to die or something and she was left on the run, then she does a great job.”

“We just have different ways of doing things. I’m all about trying new things,” Constance finished.

So where does Roy fit into the whole mix? “Well, I own and operate SOTA F/X,” Roy started. “Cleve and I have been pals for, like, 20 years.  She’s been my head designer/fabricator for probably, like, 10 now? And it’s kind of all in the family. It’s just been a long, crazy run.  He started bringing Sonja and Constance, his own daughter, around.”

“Yeah, I have my team that I use, which is basically of my family and Johnny, and it’s like, you know, we come in,” Cleve took over. “And he gets these great jobs because a lot of this stuff is with bands.  I was working for KISS and Alice Cooper and Devo.  So it was like, you know, I come in to him, and he’s like — he’ll come to me first with stuff, and I’ll be, like, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’ because I love the jobs he gets.  It’s a lot more fun than doing big food for Snapple, big fruit, you know.  That was what I used to do.”

“Although we love Snapple,” Roy chimed in. “We are very fortunate.  I mean, about 12 years ago, when digital started taking over for a lot of things, so I made a really conscious effort to try to do a lot of live-production stuff.  So I started working with bands like Alice Cooper and Devo and The Insane Club posse, and we’d get to do touring sets.  So a lot of monsters we do are for live stage shows, which is great because all of us kind of have a theatrical background. We rebuilt Alice Cooper’s cyclops from his 1975 tour.  For Cleve and I, it was dream.”

“And, suddenly, it was like KISS doing a Gene Simmons drum roll.  It was like, this is amazing.  This is stuff from when I was in high school and everything as a rock ‘n roll kid,” Cleve added. “Yeah.  I mean, doing the ghoul monsters and everything just — a lot of low-budget clips and films have come through there, and we get to do all kinds of creatures. Everything you see on the shows is perfect.  Actual films, you come through, you know.”

“Well, what’s great is we are a very working-class shop.  We are always busy.  We don’t — every once in a while, maybe every year or two, we will do one pretty-big-budget show, but we do a lot of lower- to medium-budget shows.  Consequently, we have to do a lot of them at the same time.”

“Yes, on top of each other,” Cleve laughed.

“So there’s monster after monster after monster that comes through the stop… It’s crazy,” Roy acknowledged.

We also got better insight onto their feelings on digital and CG and whether the physical is a dying art. “We are survivors,” Cleve answered. “You know, I don’t think it’s going to die.  I hope it doesn’t die.  There’s always room for it.”

“I think CG is — you know, it’s a good compliment to the physical effects,” he continued. “It shouldn’t replace them.  And to them, for those new CGs, it takes out the ‘how did they do that’ aspect of special effects because I grew up with Ray Harryhausen, and those films just – those gripping scenes, these amazing effects, it’s like now you know how they were done.”

And what’s been great is we’ve been doing a lot of practical stuff augmented digitally,” Roy joined in. “And I think the actors really like this because they have something there that they can work with, and then, later on, they go, and they augment it to make it better imposed.”

“And also, for some of these directors,” Cleve continued, “if you bring in something that is a physical effects and you show them, ‘Hey, you don’t have to shoot this digitally.  You can do this on set with this thing.’  Actors love working with it.  You bring in cool things — Tony Randall was awesome because he’s – these older school directors who work with physical effects, they are the ones — they really want it.  Some of these newer guys who have never done physical effects are kind of stared of them.”

So with so much going on within the workshops and the effects world, we were left to wonder how it would all fit into the show and each episode.

“Well, the structure right now I believe the show is going to follow is that we have one A build, we call it, one main creature that we are working on, and then there’s usually a B build, which is another project we are doing at the same time. And that’s like, you know — the only thing that lacks realism there is there’s actually three projects going on at once,” Cleve explained.

“And the way we work, there’s literally someone at our shop 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There’s no way we would ever get the things done in the time schedules that we get,” Roy revealed.

And it’s also been quite the experience to get what is going on in Cleve’s head onto paper and eventually camera. “It’s really different for me because I am very much — I do build things in my head,” Cleve admitted.

“I’ll stare at foam for two  hours and build it in my head,” Cleve said. “And working on a reality show, that doesn’t make for good television.  They want me to explain what I’m doing.  So I’m like, ‘Help.’  Yeah.  The first three days, I locked myself in my room, and then I finally came out and was like, ‘Okay.  I can do this,’ and it was awesome.”

Constance also had a few things to share about her father’s process. “You just kind of like — he’ll tell you what to do, like, ‘Oh, make this.  Make that,’ and it will be like, ‘Where is this going?’ until the very last moment.  It all comes together.  I like to draw things and try to, like, plan it out and have schematics or whatever.  I just like to plan it and have it there.”

“The reason for this being also — sometimes I don’t have a finished thing in my head,” Cleve added. “I have a visual idea in my head what I want, but I create as I go, and it’s not until the last 48 hours, okay.  Bam. It suddenly hits me.”

“And that’s not great to have a series of,” Roy teased.

“Yes,” Cleve agreed. “That’s why I was having a hard time.”

“But the other thing, too,” Roy jumped back in, “is that’s what’s magical about it is that you’ll see it go from a pile of foam on the table to a creature that’s in a movie.”

“Sometimes in the last 24 hours,” Cleve tagged on.

“But for all of us that have been doing this – Cleve has been doing it for 30 years, and I’ve been doing it for almost 30 years.  And to this day, that still magical for me to see this pile of stuff turn into a monster,” Roy admitted.

“Because I will canoodle something until the last half an hour,” Cleve explained. “For 24 hours, Constance and I are like this machine, four arms and it goes — and it always — we always make our deadlines.  We always have it there.  Sometimes you are an hour late, but it’s always there to shoot.”

“It points to Roy for being so, you know, understanding and trusting,” Constance spoke up.

“He’s running — you ask me anything, and you are going to get my answer.  ‘How is it going?  Awesome,’ because I will never accept the fact that things aren’t going awesome,” Cleve revealed. “I know, in my head, it’s going to be done.  I won’t accept the fact that it will not be done no matter how stressed I am.  So – and he doesn’t want to hear the truth anyway.”

“Which is why my -ex, Sonja, drives him insane,” Cleve continued, “because she’s like, ‘This will never going to be done.  It will never be done.  You might as well call him and tell him it’s never going to be done.’  And he’s, ‘Don’t say that.’”

This monster business is their passions, their lives and their careers. And of course the inspiration came from somewhere. For Cleve, it was a quick reply.

“Eiji Tsuburaya created Godzilla in 1954, and that was like — that was the iconic creature to me,” he started. “My mother loved monster movies.  I hated baby-sitters.  So she was taking me to movies when I was one year old.  I saw ‘Mothra’ and ‘Gorgo,’ but when I saw Godzilla versus the thing in, like, ’65 and that was Godzilla fighting the giant Mothra, it was like, from that moment on, I knew who I wanted to be.  I wanted to be Godzilla.  And I finally got to be Godzilla because I did Huey’s big adventure, and I got to play Godzilla in that.”

Constance had a harder time coming up with an answer. “Honestly, I’ve already done, like, a lot of dream jobs, as it were, like geeks and stuff… But it’s like, what I’m inspired by, those kinds of creatures, classic universal monsters, I love, you know, the creature from the black lagoon, Freddy Frankenstein, and, I mean, that’s kind of what I’m into.”

“The old-school monsters because, you know, monsters from the ’70s when it turned into slasher films, it’s just not the same,” Cleve added.

“Well, except for — I mean, the pinnacle of makeup effects, I think, was 1982, with John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”  That’s never been surpassed, and there’s not one digital optical effect in those creatures,” Roy rounded out.

They may be an unconventional family, but they are full of passion, talent and are definitely likeable enough to want to follow their story. So be sure to keep Monster Man in mind and tune in for its premiere in March 2012. For now, check out this clip to get a glimpse of what’s in store for us all from Cleve and his monster crew.