Artist breathes life into life casts

At age 9, Adrien Morot started making casts of his own face using plaster bandages he had stolen from the school nurse's office. By age 12, he had set his house on fire using flammable rubber and had been called into the principal's office for coming to school with fake bloody stumps in place of his fingers. Three decades later, the Montreal-born artist traveled the world to make life casts of Hank Azaria, Amy Adams and many of the actors in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian."

"It's kind of weird, but ever since I saw the first 'Planet of the Apes' movie, I fell in love with makeup," he says. "And then, of course, 1977 came and was the year of 'Star Wars,' and that just blew me away, and I knew that that's what I had to do in life. And if not, I would be a very unhappy person."

Happiness was not without its perils. Some of Morot's experiments with a molding material called alginate yielded, well, unexpected results. "My dad used to give me two dollars per day to eat at school, so I basically didn't eat for two weeks, and I saved my two dollars every day," he says. "And then I took my bike, and I bought a can of alginate. I had read in a magazine somewhere -- it was probably some Ukrainian magazine or something -- that you could do life casts of heads with eyes open. So the first thing I did is I mixed a little batch on my kitchen counter, and I stuck it right into my eyeball. And for about three minutes, I was holding my eye like, 'Ahhh!' "

After attending a horror convention in Los Angeles and receiving seven job offers on the strength of his portfolio, Morot opted to scrap plans to study art history at the University of Montreal and turn professional. Since then, he's worked on films including "The Day After Tomorrow," "300" and "Meet Dave." For "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," he molded a fine collection of dummies -- without sustaining any optical injuries.

No house of wax: To populate the museums, Morot and his team molded 15 to 20 stunningly life-like mannequins. "We did all of the life casts of all of the actors," he recalls. "For the first movie, ['Night at the Museum'], we tried to do stuff looking like the Hollywood Wax Museum, and all the makeup on the actors playing the wax figures was done to look a little bit overshadowed, a little too opaque. And for the second movie, we tried to do them as realistically as possible, and we put out some of the most realistic dummies I've seen."