Tonight, Face Off's Glenn Hetrick judges contestants in an all new episode of Steampunk'd on GSN. The artist recently talked to Jamie Ruby of SciFi Vision in an exclusive interview.

The judge talked about how he first became involved in judging Steampunk'd. "I really have to credit our wonderful director Peter [Ney]. He directed all of our Face Off episodes. I've been working with him for years, and he also directed Steampunk'd. And to be honest with you, we were shooting on the same stages as Steampunk'd. And my life has this weird - I don't believe in coincidences; I call it synchronicity, not coincidences. So I can remember pulling in and seeing outside of the stages what on the show is called the Punkyard. And I really looked at it and said, "What is this? What is going on here?" I had no idea there was this other show they were filming next to us, nor did I know that Peter was involved.

“Prior to being asked I had started asking questions like, "How do I get over to just look at what is going on over there? What show is this? What's happening, and how do I get in on it? I got to look at this stuff," because it immediately spoke to me, just from the outside, the little bit that I could see. And then within a few days I had been asked actually to be on it. So there were some clearances that had to happen, some things that were already taking place outside of my sphere of knowledge to have me on the show, and I was, you know, doing backflips when they asked. So a wonderful synchronicity, very serendipitous."

Hetrick's love of steampunk started partially from his interest in Dungeons and Dragons. "When I was a kid, and your mind has such a veracious appetite for art when you're a child - I'm a die hard, proud to be dyed in the wool, Dungeons and Dragons geek. I mean, I'm a dork to the twenty fifth level. I loved that stuff so much as a child. I was very much obsessed with horror films and fantasy films and science fiction films, and when Dungeons and Dragons came along, I was born in '72, so it started happening when I was a little kid. I had two second cousins who lived close to us, very intellectual; they were quite a few years older than me, and they were involved in Dungeons and Dragons from a very early pen and paper origin. So by the late 70s early 80s I had a chance to on a couple occasions play with them, and I was just hooked from day one.

“And that's exciting, because that's about when second edition in D&D started to happen, where the level of art went through the roof, and they were issuing so many source books that [had] you know deities and demi gods and Asian adventures. So it was this amazing repository of what I now know – I didn't know back then - is multicultural influences in fantasy art.

"Today a vast amount of my knowledge stems from an interest in those things, really the impetus for that interest is Dungeons and Dragons. And certainly as a child I didn't understand how rich the cultural and mythological and philosophical references were. It's something that you come to appreciate over the course of your life.

"One of the things that stood out was, I believe it might have been in an offshoot of D&D by TSR called Gamma World, maybe a specific module, where the dwarf race was represented for the first time as having this technology where they had steam-driven machines, sort of a golden age of piracy weapons like the blunderbuss, and it was all done with leather and brass and rivets. And that was my first exposure to the steampunk aesthetic.

"I also have a great love of Wells and Verne and antediluvian storytelling. So that's really where it all starts, is in literature, so the ideas, reading them and seeing them represented as art from all the amazing artists that worked in the TSR books, that was my introduction to it, and it never went away.”

Another thing that influenced him was possibly where he grew up. "I think maybe one of the reasons it resonated with me so strongly, was because I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and my dad was a Steel worker at Bethlehem Steel, so when you go back and you look at the landscape of that area at the time that I grew up, and I think still very much today, there's this heavy industrial aesthetic that just surrounds you, that you're immersed in when you grow up there. I grew up there in Hellertown; it's just next to Bethlehem. There's giant machinery and there's a tower literally that belches fire into the air, so they would smelt the metal and separate the different metals from each other by melting them, and every few minutes this huge flame would burst forth from the tower, and there was nothing but riveted steel everywhere you look, it's so cool. So I guess probably the combination of growing up there and being exposed to those particular elements at the right age is how it all started."

The judge has not really created props or sets himself in a while, as his work generally leans towards creating makeups, but some of it's been changing. "In what I do professionally at the studio, I don’t as much. It used to be that we would be asked to do more things like that. Like if you were building a demon, sometimes a show would go, "He has gauntlets, or he has this leg armor, or whatever,” and we'd build everything. And certainly you can get [that]. It depends on the show; it depends on the producers; it depends on the production designer and the wardrobe person and what they're doing or what their level of comfortability is in that world, and whether they've already done it when we come on.

"It seems that it becomes more compartmentalized as time goes on, yet at the same time, Neville Page, the other judge on Face Off, and I have now partnered and Optic Nerve has evolved into Alchemy Studios. Neville is a digital designer [and uses] ZBrush and Photoshop. I've done a ton of specialty wardrobe stuff, so we're getting more into it as we speak, and yeah, I think it's coming around.

"Where on Steven Speilberg's Extant there were a number of prosthetics that we did that were makeups, but we were exposing robotic elements, because there's an artificial intelligence aspect to that program, so we were doing a lot of robotic parts by designing in ZBrush, printing them out using 3D printers, and then using that print, not even molding it, just using that print and integrating it into the prosthetics, which is one of the core mission statements of alchemy, is that we're combining elements and changing reality by embracing things like 3D technology and integrating it into prosthetic makeups. So we're doing more of it every day.”

What Hetrick first saw when he came to Steampunk'd surprised him. "I went into the show thinking, 'This is a great idea, using this aesthetic as a basis for a show,' and then I thought to myself, 'These preconceived notions, you go in thinking well what could they possibly do?' It's a pretty complex aesthetic to work in, and the details and functioning elements are core to that aesthetic, so how could they possibly be doing big things?’

"So I kind of went in thinking that what we would have is either singles or teams of two working on one thing, like making a steampunk drill or a steampunk piano, and they would just take a piano and sort of build it, you know, artistically cover it and decorate it. When I got to the show and saw that they were taking on entire rooms, and that they had basically two day builds, third day presentation, I was went, "Are you kidding? How is that even possible?"

“I had the great fortune coming on late in the season, so a lot of the rooms were already built and on the stage. The makers that won had already integrated their rooms into the mansion so I was amazed and blown away. I just looked at them and I was like, "What are you guys talking about? What teams of people, like how many crew members are coming in at night to build?" "Oh no; they're building the entire rooms and the wardrobe and the element of the week all by themselves in teams of just a couple people." I'm like, "That's absolutely magnificent. It's far too much work to expect out of any small team in the time they were giving them, and they're killing it. Everything was so gorgeous. I have got a give a huge shoutout, if you will, to the art director and set designer. The stuff that exists on the show, not just what the builders are building, but the way the set looks and everything, and just the stuff they have around there, it's amazing."

After seeing the contestants' work, it was Josh “J.W.” Kinsey in particular that stood out to him. "The breadth of J.W.'s knowledge, his ability to artistically immerse himself, in my opinion, and make exactly the proper aesthetic choices, but also bring to the table his building skills in terms of architecture, [it's] just sick. How fast he can build, how fast he can conceptualize once he has the challenge, and how much he can get done as a team leader and as an individual working on some of the elements, a lot of the elements themselves, it blew me away. The guy's a genius."


J.W. used his mathematical and engineering skills to make items that well represented steampunk. "Looking at those rooms, I would love to have JW come in and dress up some of the shop, the way that he could take some ply[wood] or whatever and then create the quintessence of the steampunk aesthetic by cutting what are nautical shapes out of struts and then drilling holes in them. But there's a reason that says steampunk, and it's because the idea of steam driven lost technology, the issue of weight, is something of great consideration, and so a lot of the metal supports struts, very much like you see on aircrafts today, will have holes in them, so they have the same amount to bare weight, but in and of itself, the strut won't weigh as much, because you're removing a bunch of [it]. It's about structural integrity, load baring capacity.

"Those are all really cool big engineering ideas, but they say artistically, steampunk, this idea of a civilization that preexists so technologically advanced that it died out. And the civilization that follows it picks and chooses, cuts and pastes together things that they found and then applies their own rudimentary technology to drive it. That's the core of steampunk.

"And he had an amazing capacity for creating things that had that signature aesthetic that had all these engineering and mathematical ideas behind it, but to do it quick, quick, quick. And so the use of some PVC and some plywood, put together in the right way, very much symbolically says steampunk. He was the one of all the contestants that I felt that had that nailed in terms of being able to use the techniques that he learned as a carpenter, as an architect, and infuse it with the proper steampunk/engineering [architecture]."

Judging Steampunk'd for Hetrick, is not all that much different from judging Face Off. "My particular aesthetic, which of course is just mine, it doesn't make it right or wrong, those are relative ideas either way. They're subjective but for me it was a lot of the same criteria if it had to do starting of course with the massive amount of referential knowledge, the prerequisite to be good at this stuff. You can't see it on Facebook and decide you're into it and six months later consider yourself adept. It doesn't work like that. You either are or you have not immersed yourself in the art-form for years and years and years and ingested all of the literature and the movies and the art. Then that is what gives you the capacity, the library to make the right creative decisions.

"So it starts with how much you know, your mental reference library, then it becomes about being able to recall that and turn it into a smart creative decision. Something that you can with time management actually pull off and add to the scene.

"Thirdly, it's all about how well you manage it when you put those two things together, in physical reality manifesting an idea which is an energy pattern through your body, and making it happen in the time before the deadline.

"So it's a lot of the same things: it's how detailed is the work; how well thought out is it; how much does it actually reference of the [steampunk] aesthetic? Do you know what you're talking about? Not only are you skilled with your hands, but does it look like it fits in the world? It's the same thing as Face Off; they have to come up with their own backstory. And some of that, several of the contestants blew me away with their ability to come up with ingenious backstories."

Another project that Hetrick has been working on is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2. "We're a few weeks before I can really say too much, which is a shame, because what I will tell you, is it's been one hell of a ride. I've done all four of them with Ve [Neill] and I've loved each of them. Amazing challenges, amazing production teams, perhaps one of the most collaborative experiences I've ever had, to tell the truth, with both Ve and with the producers and the director. Amazing. And a fantastic director; it was fantastic.

"And there's just so much work, but certainly the lion's share of it is in the upcoming Mockingjay - Part 2. So if anyone out there is digging what they saw in the first three, the best is yet to come. That's not just a plug, because it's around the corner. My favorite character, which you haven't seen yet, is about to be revealed in just a few weeks and I think people are going to lose their minds."