Even with the effects revealed, it's hard to believe your eyes.

On Sunday, the team behind The Rise of Skywalker will compete for the best visual effects Oscar, and this exclusive new video from Industrial Light & Magic unpacks the layers of work that went into some of the film's most striking moments — including the assembly of Leia's farewell from deleted scenes shot by Carrie Fisher years before her death, the blending of old-school models and digital effects, and the creation of that Luke and Leia training flashback utiizing elements of Return of the Jedi.

Hundreds of artists worked on the film, but the VFX nominees are creature shop supervisor Neal Scanlan, and visual effects supervisors Patrick Tubach, Roger Guyett, and Dominic Tuohy (who is nominated a second time in the category for his work on 1917.) The Star Wars film will is also up for best sound editing for Matthew Wood and David Acord, and the movie received an original score nod for composer John Williams.

Leia Returns

The story of how director J.J. Abrams and his team worked together to bring back Leia Organa to complete the Star Wars saga was told in detail here in Vanity Fair's December oral history "The Guardians of Leia," but here we see exactly how the elements of Fisher from The Force Awakens were extracted and modified to give her a new costume and hairstyle, while placing her in an entirely new setting.

"When you watch the movie you just want to believe that Carrie's there, and it's just completely natural within the scene. Basing it around the performances that she'd given us previously was the key," Guyett said. "We often used motion control. You'll notice that she has a different hairstyle, she's wearing different wardrobe, all of those things. I always thought, when we were doing these shots, that everyone's looking at her face. That was the thing that we held onto, and then we fixed everything else."

The Training Sequence