10 Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Tiny Details
8. Creating The Podracing Crowd From 450,000 Cotton Buds - Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Though Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace is often dismissed as an excessively digital nightmare like its two immediate sequels, it actually has considerably more practical effects than either Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith.
And here's just one example of the painstaking detail that the effects technicians went into. For the podracing sequence, George Lucas enlisted ILM model maker Michael Lynch to create the stadium audience through practical means.
Lynch achieved this by painting cotton buds and sticking them to a model crowd stand, and to give the impression of a packed crowd, the miniature set had 450,000 cotton buds stuck to it.
A fan was then used to blow the buds around slightly and imply the movement of the crowd, all for a series of shots that almost everyone watching thought were achieved with some basic crowd duplication effects in post.