Timelord chimes in with part four of their extra diary (part one, two and three archived here) from right on the Episode II set. Great stuff in here, and some minor spoilers so you'll need to highlight below:

Day Three. It was another large day for extras about another 70 or 80 of us I guess, again a mixture of creatures and people. This scene was filmed on the set that featured in the select photo that was the large 180 degree pan of what you called a restaurant I think.

Upon arriving and completing the usual morning wardrobe stuff we moved along to the other end of Building 44 for breakfast. This was set up outside for us and 44A, where the Lars homestead had been, now became the make-up building for all of the extras. This would be where some of the girls would have to come as early as 3:30 in the morning to get made up. Any extras who were to show their face had to be suitably made up before having breakfast. From there some went down to the creature department where they would collect our heads and sit waiting for our call. On this particular day I was chatting away when I saw a box on a table and in it was Plo Koon's mask. So myself and the other SW buffs took some time to inspect a more famous mask than our own. The creatures people would also be milling around doing running repairs on any of the masks or hands if they needed it.

Several costumes were even the original ones from filming the classic movies like ROTJ and was thus a little worse for wear.

Call time was about 9 a.m. as it tended to be most mornings. This would have been an excellent time to be on the backlot tour as we all had to walk, in our costumes, from Stage 2 to Building 48. As we filed in to this building we were led past a large black curtain, up some steps and onto what looked to be a landing pad of some description. The large black curtain was a very nice shade of digital blue on the other side, so what you ended up with was a landing pad completely surrounded by a blue screen. This would be our home for the day. At the far end of the pad, which was about 15m by 60m, some workmen were constructing a ship I assume. I saw the plans of what they were building, but they were purely building plans and so didn't give any detail as to the look of the ship. Once more we would sit and wait for a while.

We were divided into people and creatures to make the A.D's, job a lot easier. As I was sitting there my friend turned to me and said "Did you see that?" to which I replied "What?". He then told me Natalie Portman had just walked all the way along the edge of the pad and into the other half of the building. Truly frustrated by this stage I politely inquired as to why he had told me AFTER she had walked through. This would happen a second time as she came back into our side and went into a makeshift changeroom they had set up. Not wanting to miss out again I sat with my eyes glued on the changeroom, waiting. This was okay until the assistants came over and erected large screens and moved us further up the platform. Annoyed even more I persisted and was finally awarded a small glimpse of her walking onto set in her costume.

We were eventually called on to set, which was as you saw it in the photo. Hayden, Natalie and R2 were up the front of the set which featured a green screen. It was asked during the day why a green screen as opposed to a blue one is used, they simply said it was a matter of how many blue elements were to be used in the shot. So I guess they didn't want us to be able to see through R2's head again. I was situated up the back off camera ready to do a few passes.

We rehearsed the scene a number of times, and the sound people weren't happy. With a lot of the costumes they give you large rubber boots to wear which are so big it's not funny. They have a zip up the front, so I assumed they were used somewhere to cover footwear perhaps in industry. These boots were making too much noise as we walked and were messing with Hayden and Natalie's dialogue, so we were told to take them off for the quiet scenes. All I will say about where we were is that it was not a restaurant. It took some time for these shots to be completed, and as I would stand off to the side I would read the couple of pages of script that the A.D. was holding. I'm sure you'd like me to divulge that information, but I won't.

Let's just say that George is true to his word, and that these couple of pages were the beginnings of a friendship between Anakin and Amidala. After that scene we went back to the platform to wait for the next call.