“When I first read the script for Semi-Pro, I was struck by the very intelligent story, and that made me laugh out loud every other line,” recalls Shane Hurlbut, ASC. Simultaneously, I was envisioning a look, including textures and colors that evoked the appropriate feelings for this story.”

Semi-Pro is based on the 1976 merger of the semi-professional American Basketball Association (ABA) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). The four top teams in an ABA playoff competition would be invited to join the NBA. The story is set in Flint, MI, where the (fictitious) Tropics are contending to be one of the final four. The New Line Cinema film was directed by veteran executive producer Kent Alterman, taking his first turn at the helm, and Scot Armstrong’s script called for much of the story to be staged in the arena where the team played its home games.

Hurlbut went to his first meeting with Alterman with very specific ideas for a visual grammar, augmented by a stack of photographic reference books filled with images that he envisioned. He exchanged ideas with the director and showed him the pictures.

“We agreed on a basic visual strategy, that included a Kodachrome-look, like the Ektachrome news film that we saw on television during the 1970s,” Hurlbut says. “It’s a rich look that has a unique contrast ratio. You see stark blacks mixed with open mid-tones. Oranges, reds, and blues saturate more than today’s color negative films, therefore Kent and I both felt that it looked natural for the time and place.”

They initially discussed producing Semi-Pro at 1.85:1, using the more vertical frame to visually punctuate images of tall athletes playing basketball. Hurlbut credits Steadicam/A-camera operator Roberto De Angelis with making a compelling argument for framing images in widescreen 2.4:1 instead. The backgrounds, including players on the court, fans in the stands, coaches, and substitutes on the benches, are all integral elements of the story, like non-verbal dialogue.

“We decided that the Super-35 film format coupled with digital intermediate [DI] timing was the right path for this film,” Hurlbut says. “We envisioned extending cinematography into DI post-production as a tool for manipulating colors and contrast to get a Kodachrome look, and for finessing lighting on faces and other elements of frames.”

Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, a bar owner who uses the money he makes from writing a hit song called “Love Me Sexy” to buy the Tropics. He also coaches and plays on the team. A large ensemble cast includes Woody Harrelson along with actual basketball players. “We needed people who could dribble, pass and shoot the ball,” Hurlbut explains.

Sets were built in a former Los Angeles Police and Fire Departments training center near Dodger Stadium. In addition to the basketball court and surrounding stands, other sets included a locker room, hallways and a lobby at the arena, Moon’s bar, and the interior of a police station.

“I had a close collaboration with [production designer] Clayton Hartley during preproduction,” Hurlbut says. “Our visual references included still pictures of the basketball arena where the Milwaukee Bucks played during the 1970s. They had cool, three-headed top lights that look like big bell fixtures. I also went to a [Los Angeles] Lakers basketball game, where the lighting was totally focused on the floor of the court and the fans in the stands were in shadows. I loved that look because it popped the players out from the background-the athletes were gladiators on the court.”

Hartley designed the basketball court set, including the stands and areas around it, so that Hurlbut could use motivated light from any direction. “My rigging gaffer, Scott Graves, hung 40 Mole-Richardson PAR 64 Maxi Space lights over the court area. Hartley designed a barrel-type fixture that made the lights become practical and gave us the freedom to shoot 360 degrees. We called them the trash-can lights.”

The camera package provided by Panavision Hollywood included a Panaflex XL that was primarily used for Steadicam shots, a couple of Platinums, and a Pan Arri 435 that was used for ramping frame rates at high speeds. Hurlbut chose a blend of old Panavision Mark II 20, 29 and 55 mm primes with glass from 1967 and modern Primo prime and zoom lenses, which he used like a painter choosing the right brushes.

“The old Mark II lenses have a tendency to flare when light strikes the glass,” he explains. “The images are a bit softer with less contrast and richer blacks. It’s a subtle difference that looked and felt was right for the Kodachrome-period look.”

A cinematographer choosing the right emulsion for a particular project is like an artist deciding whether a portrait can best be rendered with oil paint or watercolors. Hurlbut chose Kodak VISION2 5229 color negative film. The 500-speed film is designed to record lower-contrast images with less-saturated colors than 5218.

Some 46 days of the 55-day production schedule were dedicated to filming scenes on the basketball court and other sets at the training center. The other days were divided between filming shots to establish locations in Flint and city scenes in Los Angeles.

“We had six or seven characters that were a major presence in the locker room, on the bench and on the basketball court,” Hurlbut says. “One of the more interesting challenges was covering the action in scenes where we were linking them together, so the audience sees how they are reacting to something done by Will or someone else, especially when they were constantly moving on the basketball court. We had to keep everybody in the frame from the right perspectives and in the right light.”

There are dolly shots tracking the length of the court, and high angle perspectives filmed from a 50-foot Technocrane soaring overhead. Sometimes Hurlbut stationed a camera under the hoop and two others in the corners of the baseline for shots moving towards the basket. The camera was generally objective, like a witness rather than a participant. When there were funny lines, he sometimes came in for close-ups of facial expressions, though that depended on whether the comedy was physical or subtle.

“The camaraderie of the guys on the team is an important part of the story,” he explains. “We wanted to link those characters together and show the audience the looks in player’s eyes and the expressions on their faces at the right times.”

Hurlbut used a dimmer board on the basketball court set to make real-time adjustments from shot to shot, and also when an actor did something spontaneous. “The dimmer board was the answer to one of our biggest challenges while we were shooting scenes on the basketball court,” Hurlbut says. “We lit areas rather than marks to give Will and the actors the freedom to be spontaneous. We would have never made our days if we lit for one direction and turned around and re-lit for the next shot.”

There are countless visual subtleties seamlessly weaved into the fabric of the story. For an intimate close-up of Ferrell at a seminal moment in the final game, the camera is looking up from a low angle and shooting at 120 frames per second. “My key grip, David Knudsen, came up with a rig where we put Will on a scaffolding tower and photographed him through a piece of ½-inch Plexiglass,” Hurlbut says. “The camera now feels like it is the floor point of view and suspends that moment in time. There is a similar slow-motion shot when a referee tosses a jump ball into the air. As the spinning ball comes down and into focus the audience can read the ABA logo on its surface.”

Front-end lab work was done at Deluxe Labs. Laser Pacific provided HD dailies that were timed by Tim Vincent and Gregg Lang. Dailies were viewed in a trailer by Alterman, Hurlbut and members of his crew during lunch hours. He says that this shared experience was an integral part of keeping everyone inspired and on the same page.

After Semi-Pro was edited offline, the conformed negative was scanned at 4K resolution at Efilm, in Los Angeles. The digital master file was down-resed to 2K and timed by Hurlbut in an interactive environment with DI colorist Michael Hatzer.

“The DI was the icing on the cake,” Hurlbut concludes. “I have done five or six DIs, so I knew instinctively when we could save time on the set by fine-tuning looks in DI. We used windows to isolate elements of frames and fine-tuned colors and contrast to formulate the 1970s look we envisioned.”