Yet at the end of the production pipeline of DisneysWreck-It Ralphwas a very busy effects team.

Very early back on where I started.

So what kind of apprenticeship was that?

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Those were when I started out in the industry.

I moved out here to L.A. around 1995.

It was a fairly good time to get into the industry.

Being in my late 20s and moving to L.A. was a very exciting process.

On those films, I was merely doing software development.

When I first started out I was doing software development, and then I transitioned into production.

But my background at school is art history and fine arts.

Coming from two parents who were engineers, I learned how to do software development.

But everything in between can get very technical, because its all done with computers.

Computers can be dangerous things.

It sound like youre balancing that too?

Its the skill of artists to hit the goal and use the computer as a tool.

It can be very helpful, just like any other tool.

or it can be detrimental to what youre trying to achieve.

You cant just rely on the software and hardware.

The film effectively started in its current guise around 2007.

When do you first learn you were working on it?

For me, I was brought on about a year and a half ago.

I was the first effects person brought on, to evaluate the story at that point.

I did a high level view of what we were going to do for this film.

And what I saw was that there were so many effects in there, of so many different varieties.

So this film has two effects supervisors.

Here at Disney, the way its broken down is that were always trying to create a believable world.

That extends down from the sets, the environments, and the characters in it.

What we do in effects is to add motion to the worlds surrounding our characters.

All of that falls under effects.

Whats the percentage breakdown of your work then, between the seen and the unseen?

It varies from world to world.

All of it takes time!

Then there are shots like dust or leaves, where we dont have a lot of them.

You have different tiers of explosions and fire here, depending on where its happening?

That was another challenge.

What is fire in each different world?

That was one of the challenges we had, finding that out.

Working with the effects designer.

We found having step motion, as 8-bit games moved, with repeated patterns.

That doesnt mean boring: it means making it fit into that world.

Simplification, but still appealing.

You seem to be aiming for sophisticated simplification if anything.

Its less about the tools and more about the work that comes out of it.

We want them looking at the characters.

There are clearly subtle differences between the worlds in the film as well of the overt ones.

The speed the camera seems to move, for instance.

The perspective its allowed seems to alter slightly.

How does that impact your work?

For us, when we start working on shots, certain sets have to be prepared for us.

Whenever I talk to people involved in animated films, the pace of the animation seems to increase.

The lighting department, along with the effects, were at the back end of the pipeline.

Our deadline is a hard deadline: its when the movie comes out.

And being at the end of the pipeline definitely presents challenges of making sure the work gets done.

Does it throw up a surprise?

Its a creative environment, where things are always evolving and changing.

That said, its part of the daily process that there are always things to fix!

Cesar Velazquez, thank you very much.

Wreck-It Ralphis released in theUKon February 8th.