A crowd... of cotton swabs

The arena, where the Podrace starts, was realized by building miniature sets in varying scales. To fill up the stadium with thousands of characters, ILM (George Lucas' special effects company) model makers had to make use of various procedures, depending on the required effect. They blew air onto multicolored cotton swabs making them sway to give the illusion of a disorderly mob, a large crowd of people seen from far away. For close-up shots, showing characters with distinctive faces, extras filmed in Tunisia were multiplied by the magic of digital effects and added to the miniature bleachers, whose various perspectives were completed by computer-generated images. In wide action shots of the crowd, for example doing the wave, we can see thousands of 3-D created spectators standing up to applaud the Podracer pilots. During this sequence, 350,000 computer-generated extras appear on screen.