'Arrival' VFX Breakdown: See The Alien Landing Sites Before And After Seamless Visual Effects

Sometimes when it comes to visual effects, less is more. In the case of the acclaimed sci-fi hit Arrival, there's not a mess of blockbuster spectacle that needed to be done in order to bring the arrival of these unique aliens to life. While there are aliens created with visual effects, there aren't any cities that need to be intricately blown up in post-production or anything like that.

If you'd like to see some of the visual effects work that went into Arrival, a breakdown from Oblique FX has been made available online, showing how they manipulated footage that was shot on location to make it look like one of the sites where the unidentified flying objects is located. It should come as no surprise to see that the giant, pebble shaped ships were created in post-production, but you might be surprised by what is real and what isn't.

Watch the Arrival visual effects breakdown after the jump.

Sadly, we don't get to see a breakdown of the creation of the aliens themselves, but it's still fascinating to see how many little touches were added in visual effects, and even some that weren't. For example, one shot features an artificial sunrise behind the mountain range beside the ship while another shot shows that the rolling mists on the same mountains were actually real. There's another shot where the trucks racing towards the ship were added in post-production, and I never would have guessed that.

Oblique FX seems to be rather good at creating the kind of visual effects that blend in seamlessly with the real world. They also did the essentially invisible visual effects of Sicario, which you can see right here.

However, I think that maybe the most impressive visual effect in the movie may be this one:

That's right, in some of the sequences, the orange radiation suits were created entirely in post-production. I never even stopped to think that they might be a visual effect, but as you can see, Rodeo Visual Effects Company did an amazing job tricking us.

If you want to see more of the work that Rodeo did on Arrival, check out a cool gallery right here.