Stranger Than Fiction graphics

I watched Stranger Than Fiction again earlier today and realized I haven’t mentioned it on here yet. If you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth a watch. It’s definitely something that creative people would find interesting if only for the visuals. Will Ferrell gives a great performance as the low-key main character and Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson are also brill.

The film is about a man whose job requires him to be very good with numbers and, as a result, he counts/measures everything he sees in passing. The story itself, however, is about how he is the main character in a book that’s being written – he begins to hear the author narrating his actions as he goes about daily life and we eventually learn whether he is controlling himself or not.

Throughout the film there’s a layer of really clean, crisp, white animated graphics that playfully illustrate Harold’s (the main character’s) thoughts – his counting of steps or measurements of soap in its dispenser. What’s so good about it is that it very quietly persists with the scrupulously systematic nature of the main character without distracting the audience or becoming exhaustive. MK12 are the designers behind it: I’ve added images below of: their early ideas – which, thankfully, were dropped; the MK12 banner; and some screenshots of the final outcome, as seen in the film.