Wyatt Pike, 7, is watching his mother, Heather, give birth to him on an oversized IMAX screen with a tub of popcorn in his lap. The theater full of strangers surrounding him applaud and gasp. For them, the Salt Lake City Clark Planetarium film, “The Human Body,” is a scientific documentary detailing the various biological systems within us that make us tick. For Wyatt, however, it’s his home video.
On screen, Heather is larger than life, depicted in hyper-real detail through a large format camera lens and also infinitesimal cameras that reveal her internal workings, such as what it looks like inside her stomach when she digests pasta, or what happens to her brain when she thinks about what to make for breakfast.
In the theatre Monday night, however, Heather is life size, only two seats away from Wyatt, sitting beside her father and mother, Susan and Jim Miles, all of whom drove drove down from Park City together. The adults watch Wyatt attentively: Since the film’s premiere in 2001, Wyatt has never seen it on a large screen at an age old enough to understand.
“He was a baby first saw the world premiere in 2001 and we got the DVD about a year ago and that was when he first saw it consciously,” Heather explains. “This is really the first time he’s seeing it on the big screen, so it’s really exciting for us.”
“The Human Body,” produced by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, is an inside look of the secrets of a human being’s inner mechanics, from what happens when a boy pedals his bicycle to school, to the minute firings of the human brain’s 250-mile-per-hour synapses. In one scene, the cochlea inside the ear is enlarged to fit the screen at 2,500 times its natural size, revealing infinitesimal hairs that help to detect sound.
The Pikes’ journey of their first pregnancy serves as a narrative on which to hang these various facts the documentary seeks to illuminate through pencil-thin cameras, x-rays and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Throughout the film, there are scenes of the Pikes going about their daily lives at the dinner table eating together and in the bathroom with Buster, Heather’s husband, shaving in front of a mirror. Often “The Human Body” touches base with Heather, who shares her insights about what it means to go through the process of becoming a mother.
At the time the film was shot, the family lived in London, and as a result, Heather has a faint British accent in the film. People who have seen “The Human Body” usually don’t recognize her, she says. She’s dropped the baby weight, and along with it, the accent, leaving London to return to the East Coast near where she was raised and then to Park City, Utah four years ago to join her parents after the birth of her daughter Hazel, who is four.
The Pikes became a part of “The Human Body” when Heather met a member of the BBC science department the Saturday after she discovered she was pregnant with Wyatt. Three other couples with earlier due dates were up for the role, but producers chose for the Pikes. In a press release for the film, Director-Producer Peter Georgi explains, “Heather is a natural in front of the camera she responded to direction and was able to be herself in the face of the quite cumbersome process of large format filming.”
Indeed, Buster recalls the shooting process as quite complex. Large-format cameras are more than four times the size of hand-held cameras and need to be loaded with film every three minutes, he says.
“For one bathroom shot there were 20 people in front of me they took out the wall to watch me shave,” he says. “It’s also a really loud camera, so afterwards, we rerecorded some of our dialogue.”
Both Heather and Buster were relieved at the final product, which left quite a bit of film on the editing floor, including Heather’s natural-birth 40-hour labor, which the director gave the family for their home archives. Heather enjoyed the experience, still “the fun part, I think, is getting to watch it now,” Heather says.
As far as Wyatt’s response six years after his silver screen debut, at first he demurs shyly to give a review, joking that his mother “is crazy” to have volunteered for such a project. But, finally, he arrives at a more direct response: Watching his mother on screen “is really amazing,” he says.
See ‘The Human Body’ and ‘Sesame Street Presents: The Body’
What: A BBC IMAX film, “The Human Body” at the Clark Planetarium and an interactive exhibit at Discovery Gateway
Where: The Gateway Mall located at 110 S 400 West, Salt Lake City
When: visit Discovery Gateway Mondays and Fridays from 10 a.m. through 9 p.m., Tuesdays through Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.’ Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ; Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. See the film, “The Human Body” at the Clark Planetarium nightly, Mondays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.
Prices: Tickets range from $6.55 to $8.43, depending on the age of ticket holder. Tickets to Discovery Gateway for Utah non-members and children above the age of one are $8.50.
For more information: visit discoverygateway.org or clarkplanetarium.org.