Avoiding Action Fatigue: How a Fight Scene From Normal Was Shot to Stand Out

In my first conversation with director Ben Wheatley about Normal, he said, “Think High Noon shot in the '70s, and all the action takes place in a blizzard during a power outage.” Given that many of the sequences would naturally fall into the same lighting palette using candles, flashlights, moonlight and a lot of atmosphere, our second conversation was about how we would avoid action fatigue. Ben was adamant that each action beat needed its own visual stamp. The hardware‑store fight is the clearest example of how we approached that.

This sequence takes place in the middle of the night as Sheriff Ulysses Richardson (Bob Odenkirk) and a pair of bank robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) — both of whom have become Ulysses' unlikely allies — are being hunted through the blizzard. Bob is shot at and blown through the window of a hardware store. That impact sets off a backup alarm system and triggers slow-firing strobes throughout the store. He has an extended hand-to-hand fight with the hardware-store owner (Carson Nattrass), during which a sprinkler head gets knocked off. So, now it’s raining inside while a blizzard rages outside. The combination of strobes, rain and snow created a completely different look from the rest of the film.

Setting the Stage

All of this was done on stage. Production designer Jean-Andre Carriere oversaw the build of 150 feet of street and storefronts on soundstages at Manitoba, Winnipeg. That, in and of itself, presented a challenge because the set was built fire lane, so I shot some “visibility tests” during prep to make sure I could make the street recede into nothingness.

We hung night-grey backings at either end of the street and filled the stage with enough atmosphere that an actor could be perfectly resolved in a medium shot on a wide lens, turn and run from camera, and disappear in 40 feet. Since that look defined several sequences, the hardware‑store fight needed to feel completely different.

Early on, I pitched the notion that the store might have a backup battery powering its alarm system. Ben immediately said, “I love it — and you know what looks great with strobes? Rain.” My first reaction was, “Rain from where?” His answer: “We’ll knock out a sprinkler head.”

Special effects had to plumb the sprinkler system and engineer a practical gag where a crowbar strike would break the vial in the sprinkler head and start the water flow.

We tested water pressure extensively. Too much and it looked like a monsoon, too little and it was just mist. Then there was the constant battle of keeping lenses from fogging and balancing the temperature of the water with the temperature of the stage.

Lighting and Programming Cues

For the strobes, the art department cut four‑by‑six‑inch holes into the set and installed glass diffusers so they looked like part of the alarm system on screen. Behind each diffuser, we mounted Prolycht LED Fresnels, pushed right up against the glass.

Gaffer John Clarke and I tested a variety of burst patterns. What worked best, especially once we added rain, was a fast burst with a slow chase across the set. It took just under a second for all five strobes to fire. The effect was chaotic but readable, and it gave us those beautiful flash frames that freeze the action mid‑impact.

Ambient room tone came from Arri Orbiters bounced into white cards, with selected ceiling tiles removed to create soft overhead ambience. But the strobes alone weren’t enough to light faces, so we added fixtures that operated at low intensity for modeling, then jumped to full output when the strobe chase passed through them. Every light had to be tied into the cue. Ami Buhler, our console programmer, was instrumental in making that system work.

Why Global Shutter Was Essential

The combination of strobes and rain made camera choice especially important. We chose the Red V‑Raptor XL (X) specifically for its global shutter — essential not only for strobes, but for rendering flashing police lights in a snowstorm.

I wanted to avoid broken frames where half the frame rendered frozen, backlit snow, the other falling to black. Fixing that in VFX would have been prohibitively expensive; the V-Raptor held captured the frozen snow in a very natural way.

I shot 8K for a 4K finish to get the benefit of low noise, the full sensor use (supersampling) and a really beautiful image even at 1,600 ISO.

We primarily shot two cameras but in the hardware store, the action was so specific and the aisles so tight that we could only squeeze in a second camera for a handful of shots. My A‑camera operator, Matt Schween, was a key collaborator and shot mostly handheld for this sequence. The camera becomes a third participant in the fight, and Matt had to anticipate movement without revealing that he knew what was coming. His instincts were impeccable.

I shot the show on T-Tuned Tribe7 Blackwing7 primes. This was my first time using that lens set, and I loved the character they brought to the image. For longer focal lengths in exterior work, we carried Arri Signature Zooms, but the hardware‑store fight was all primes.

In-Camera Effects

The show LUT was developed with my longtime collaborator Ian Vertovec (supervising colorist, Light Iron). We built a film emulation LUT with deep shadows and noticeable grain which was very much the aesthetic Ben wanted for the 1970s and '80s films we were referencing. The atmosphere from the blizzard lifted the shadows and added texture. The final look was very close tour show LUT. For final color, we graded in London. I worked remotely with Rob Pizzey, using Sohonet’s ClearView sessions and Frame.io reviews.

Ben wanted the action in this scene to escalate through the props, which also allowed the comedy to emerge. The stunt team would pre‑shoot the fight on video while we were filming on another set, and we’d refine the set pieces based on that. It helped that Bob is incredibly skilled at selling choreography and giving the camera exactly what it needs.

There’s a grisly practical gag right at the end involving a penny nail and a prosthetic eye piece which I love. Every film Ben referenced was from the '70s and '80s, built on practical effects so shooting effects in-camera was baked into his vision. CG was always the last resort.

It’s a fight in the middle of a blizzard, inside a store that’s raining, lit by strobes. It’s chaotic, but it’s controlled chaos.

Unit stills by Allen Fraser, SMPSP. Images courtesy of Magnolia Pictures and the filmmakers.