Inside the Living Body Premieres Sunday, September 16 9p et/pt Preview three clips before the show airs.

Its Inside The Living Body week here on the NGC Blog. Today's feature is an interview with the show's producer Stephen Marsh. He gives his take on what it was like filming this special and what challenges he and his crew encountered.

Check in tomorrow for facts about the innner workings of your body that you might have not known.

NGC: Exactly how did you insert endoscopic cameras into a person’s body?

Stephen Marsh: We did not insert endoscope cameras ourselves for the show. Endoscopy is an invasive procedure and therefore should only be done by a certified physician and only for clinical reasons such as health issues or special research.

The endoscopic footage we used was provided by specialist doctors and had been previously shot during standard medical procedures.

The footage of the stomach and esophagus was taken as I said above by trained physicians using an endoscope passed into the mouth and then down into the stomach. For the images of internal fat and an ovary the camera was inserted through the umbilicus.

NGC: I imagine this technique can be of great use to the medical industry?

Stephen Marsh: Endoscopic cameras are routinely used for a wide range of conditions and are commonly used to look for conditions such as ulcers. They can also be used to take biopsies at the same time. I recently had an endoscope procedure for a suspected ulcer. Instead they found a hiatus hernia.

NGC: The viewer sometimes can’t tell the difference between graphics and actual imagery from inside the body. Is the intent of the documentary to blend these two visual techniques?

Stephen Marsh: The idea of the documentary was to take the viewer on a journey through the internal workings of the human body. Though we are all very different externally we wished to show the commonality of our internal life. It was a deliberate ploy to blend the techniques — you are watching a mixture of models, CGI, real footage all joined seamlessly together. We wanted to keep people in the moment and on the journey — if there were jagged jumps between footage then they would be taken out the experience. We took great care to create all models and CGI from real tissue and match frames so the junctions were seamless. We had to use CGI and models to visualize elements that would be impossible to capture in real life — but by blending the images together into a seamless whole we create the illusion of a journey through a living body.

NGC: What challenges did the producers face in creating “Inside the Living Body”?

Stephen Marsh: The challenges were endless such as: How do you capture impossible shots? How do visualize a brain working or a pain impulse traveling down nerves? How do you bring to life such a complex and remarkable machine as the human body in a way that is both enlightening but entertaining? How do make our insides not look like a butchers shop — a steak is made up of muscles that looks remarkably like our own? It was huge challenge to illustrate many of the working of our bodies — some that occur at the microscopic level. Also because you can’t just shove a camera inside someone we had to developed new and innovative ways of illustrating what happens there. Also we had the challenge of finding a series of women from nought to 80 who all looked alike to play the woman through the film. It was also very challenging making the bodies become transparent on moving shots — this took a combination of careful lighting camerawork and CGI. In all it was one of the most challenging shows I have ever done.