Carnegie Science Center gets under the skin in 'The Human Body'

''The Human Body," an Omnimax film opening today at Carnegie Science Center, starts like many Omnimax films - a giant, sweeping panorama of an unusual terrain, artfully captured on film.

The scene at first looks like a dark crater, in a gently sloping valley that is completely smooth on both sides.

It's a belly button.

Omnimax films aren't just intended for capturing mountain ranges.

"The Human Body," a striking 40-minute documentary on the body's systems, makes microscopic images from deep inside the body not just larger than life, but larger than apartment buildings.

Cameras capture everything from thermal images of a boy riding a bike to a neuron, or brain cell, firing its electrical impulses at 250 miles per hour to dictate the body's actions.

And though the filmmakers carefully reconstructed scenes of food reaching the stomach and intestines, and show close-ups of teenagers popping pimples, the film is far more tame than the Science Center exhibit it complements - "Grossology."

"(The body) tends to be a dry subject. The challenge is to have some fun," says Peter Georgi, the director of "The Human Body," speaking by phone from his office in London.

Georgi makes science documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corp. Before "The Human Body," Georgi and his colleagues already had created an eight-hour television documentary on the human body for the BBC and The Learning Channel. They were well-versed in the subject matter before they took on the three-year Omnimax project.

The filmmakers trained high-tech cameras on blood cells moving through the tiny alveoli sacs in the lungs, the liver secreting bile, and sperm cells - here magnified 80,000 times so they look 2 feet long - traveling to the egg.

"We do believe we have the biggest optical magnification in film history," Georgi says of the sperm sequence, which is set to the music of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On." Cute.

The reconstructed scenes - mostly done because real filming was impossible, Georgi says - also include computer-generated X-rays of the boy on his bike and a crawling baby, and images of growing hair and of the valves and exterior of a beating heart.

One of the main human subjects of "The Human Body" is a woman's pregnancy. After searching for the right person for three years, Georgi and company selected Heather Pike, an American public relations executive who was living in England at the time.

Pike, 32, appears with her real-life husband, Buster, and their "nephew" and "niece" - two actors whose bodies also are subjects in the film.

Close-ups of the body's inner workings occur as the characters go about their days - the children go to school and Buster heads to work. The added plot, even though it is fabricated, helps to keep the film moving quickly.

But Pike's pregnancy was entirely real. She was 13 weeks pregnant when the crew began filming her. They filmed and interviewed Pike every four to five weeks. Her first ultrasound scan is on film. Onscreen, she talks about how she is progressing, transformations in her body as the baby grows and her feelings about becoming a mom.

She had once been fascinated by a museum exhibit she saw on childbirth. When a scientist working on the film approached her about being in it - the two met strictly by coincidence - she was happy to oblige.

Most of the time, Pike had no problem being featured in a biology-lesson version of "The Real World," she says, via phone from her new home in Beverly, Mass. She now works fulltime as a mom.

"My husband remembers one time (during the pregnancy) I was in tears, worried I was going to give birth to the missing link on the world's biggest screen," she says. "But I think that was just hormones."

She even let the crew follow her into the delivery room, where she spent 30 hours in labor.

Complications arose, and a doctor told her she might have to have a Caesarian section. The camera crew offered to leave, but Pike wouldn't hear of it.

"It felt like having family there," she says.

Samuel Wyatt, her son, came out just fine, weighing in at a bouncing 9 pounds, 13 ounces. Pike brought him to "The Human Body" film preview at the Science Center on Tuesday.

He's now a blond-haired, cheerful and curious tyke of 19 months who, as his mother remarked with some exasperation Tuesday, has just discovered how to pick his nose.

He already has seen himself in "The Human Body" several times. Perhaps he's ready for "Grossology" now.