How Digital Domain Made the Aliens in Disclosure Day

Digital Domain has released its VFX breakdown reel for Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s alien thriller from this summer. The video runs five minutes and shows how the studio put aliens, animals and a stack of other CG elements into the film.

Digital Domain was the lead vendor. VFX supervisor Joel Behrens and a team of nearly 400 artists delivered 418 final shots, out of 544 the studio was handed. Those include the CG animals, an evolving crop circle and a 40-shot train chase. Houdini did a lot of the heavy lifting, along with a new muscle system the studio built for the film’s creatures.

Disclosure Day at a glance

• Released: June 12, 2026, by Universal Pictures
• Director: Steven Spielberg, from a screenplay by David Koepp
• Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo and Wyatt Russell
• Box office: opened at No. 1 with $44 million domestic and finished around $245 million worldwide on a $115 million budget
• Production VFX supervisor: Matthew Butler, with the work split between Digital Domain, Weta FX and Storm Studios
• Practical aliens: Legacy Effects

Janusz Kaminski shot it on 35mm film, which matters here. Every CG shot had to sit next to real film grain and real New Jersey locations without giving itself away.

The brief: make it look like real UFO footage

Spielberg did not want slick, stylized sci-fi. The team built its look from documented UFO reports and military FLIR footage, the grainy infrared clips that have leaked out of the Pentagon over the years.

Butler has explained the logic. The movie is about a cover-up of things people say they saw, so the alien could not stray far from those descriptions. Inventing something brand new would have worked against the story. Production designer Adam Stockhausen developed the design with Spielberg, and the VFX teams turned those 2D concepts into a 3D character.

For one UAP scene, Digital Domain recreated the declassified 2015 Navy F-18 footage. They simulated the jet’s nose-cone gimbal camera so the framing and movement match the real clips.

In Vivo 17, the hero alien

The main alien goes by In Vivo 17, and it had to hold up in close-ups. Its big moment is a shot where it opens its eyes and acknowledges the main characters.

To sell that, the head is built from multiple skull plates that shift from a closed protection state into an awake state as the eyes open. Its throat-clicking sound drives the neck, and the neck drives skin and muscle movement up into the face. The FX team added a simulated layer of tears over the eyes.

Grey skin is a trap. Audiences get suspicious of any skin tone they have never seen. The answer was to light it like human skin, with light soaking into and through a semi-translucent surface. The smaller aliens in the flashbacks were puppets, which Digital Domain touched up with livelier eyes and head moves. Their costumes got a procedural sequin system so the tiny beads never overlap.

The stag, the cardinal and the forest animals

The studio also built a stag, a cardinal, a raccoon, a fox and several baby deer. None of them existed on set. The young actress worked off stuffed stand-ins, tape marks and a tennis ball on a stick, plus a stag-sized shape so she and the camera crew had the right eyeline.

The cardinal was the hardest. Birds move so fast that animators had to work on ones, posing nearly every single frame instead of letting the computer fill in between key poses. It also needed a new feather system so the neck could turn and the wings could fold without feathers poking through each other. The fox went through several versions to find the line between natural and slightly storybook.

Spielberg wanted the animals to feel real but a little off, and the eyes carry that. They are a touch too bright on purpose. It pays off in the shot Butler calls a favorite: a 180-degree camera move around the stag that ends on the alien. There is no standard morph. The change happens through focus, lens work and overlapping texture passes, so the compositors could slide from fur to bare skin to alien.

A new muscle system built for the show

To keep up with all those creatures across several offices, Digital Domain built a new creature muscle system with three levels of detail. Hero shots get the full simulation. A middle tier covers the rest, and an automated approximation handles quick turnarounds.

According to the studio, it takes about two weeks to fit the system to a new character. It keeps the rig’s deformations and adds the small stuff that makes a creature feel alive, like skin sliding over muscle and a bit of jiggle.

The 40-shot train chase

The film’s big action scene has the heroes climbing onto the hood of a car while a moving train drags it down the tracks, under gunfire, ending in a crash. Spielberg likes practical first, so it started for real. Dan Sudick’s special effects crew had a real train pull a real car with two stunt performers riding it on location in New Jersey.

That footage became the backbone. The actors were shot on bluescreen at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn. Digital Domain rebuilt the whole location in CG from lidar scans and texture photos, using modular sections of track that snap together so the editors could recut freely. Houdini scattered the grass and gravel, and matte paintings handled the skies.

Paint artists removed the rig that towed the car and held the stunt performers. The studio’s Charlatan tool swapped actors’ faces onto stunt doubles in a couple of shots. The crash itself is all digital. The train and car were split into pieces with their own material properties, run through a physics simulation, then layered with flying glass, a loose trunk lid and debris.

The crop circle, blade by blade

The overhead crop-circle shot started as a plain field with a little grass dressing for lighting reference. Digital Domain replaced the whole field with CG and painted out the crew tents and camera tracks.

Millions of grass blades would choke a render, so the FX team split each blade into five segments instead of bending whole blades one at a time. That let them instance millions of them and still keep the circle’s layout exact. Wind animation was matched to real reference footage, and live-action grass was kept around the actor’s feet.

Snow, a derecho and an invisible fire truck

A fairy-tale winter sequence began with an actress walking on sand against bluescreen to fake the drag of deep snow. Almost everything around her is CG, sometimes down to her legs and feet. Houdini’s Vellum grains made the footprints and the snow kicking up around her steps, and ice-coated trees took extra care to keep refraction from sparkling into render noise.

Other one-off effects include snow falling upward around a cottage, an all-CG spacecraft moving through a derecho storm cloud, and puddles and wheel-well spray from a fire truck nobody can see. The team also matched modern digital footage, 35mm and 40 to 60 historical stock plates covering about 70 years, all finished for 4K. They even made the content for hundreds of practical playback screens in the film’s broadcast booth.

The invisible work you probably missed

The flashy shots get the attention, but a lot of the work is meant to go unnoticed. Spielberg kept designing camera moves that no real camera could make, so the crew cut real cars apart and rebuilt them digitally. One shot follows the heroes ducking inside a car, then pulls out through the roof. It blends location footage with a later bluescreen shoot of the actors in a sliced-open car.

Another shot follows Josh O’Connor’s character across a field with a drone, then hands off to a handheld camera as the operator jumps into a car with him. The two were blended into one continuous take. Butler admits the speed difference between the cameras made it tough, but most viewers will never spot the join.

Tools and team

Work ran from January 2025 to April 2026 across Digital Domain’s North American offices and its studio in Hyderabad, India. Joel Behrens supervised, with VFX producer Dan Booty and animation supervisor Liz Bernard. The main tools were SideFX Houdini, Autodesk Maya and Foundry Nuke.

Digital Domain built the core assets and shared models, development and renders with Weta FX and Storm Studios. Shared pieces included a handheld alien device and the effects it has on different characters. Behrens has a long run at the studio, with credits on X-Men: Days of Future Past, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

For more studio reels, see our guide to what a VFX breakdown is and how they are made and the VFX Breakdown Archives. Digital Domain’s history is a story of its own, including its bet on video games.

Production details come from Digital Domain, postPerspective and The Art of VFX’s interview with Matthew Butler.