Hi Alec,
The crowd was a group of 5 or 6 low poly characters added to a custom figure which allowed 2(?), i think, characters to raise/wave thier arms.
Then that multy charactered figure was imported several times into scene and placed to look like a larger crowd.
It was a long time ago now, but i do remember that it did take some time to render, and was pretty much maximum characters i could add.
My renders are usually pretty straight fwd, no shadows, fog etc, which helps.
If i remember rightly, the crowd was added last, so as not to bog things down when animating the 2 guitars. (which were mainly animated in sequence mode, with the walk added in scene).
I do remember that the scene was pushing my pc to the limits. The crowd was textured with just a simple variety of colours, some have glasses, some long hair, short hair, different colours, but a closer look and you can see they're only half a dozen 'different' looking people.