Every friendship is different, and each is worth celebrating. So, we created a new kind of film to celebrate all of the unique people and friendships across the United Kingdom. The film would be personalized for everyone in the UK and delivered to peoples’ News Feed as a gift from Facebook.

The result was Your Story of Friendship—a first-of-its-kind film that celebrates you, your friends and some of the most meaningful moments you’ve shared together on Facebook. It was a uniquely cinematic and personalized film that combined technology, music and your photos from Facebook in an innovative new way that surprised and delighted its viewers. Most importantly, Your Story of Friendship helped everyone take a moment to remember just how much our friends mean to us all.

Your Story of Friendship is a personalized film that celebrated you and your closest friends by pulling in your most meaningful photos and visualizing your friendships in a whole new way. To do this, we built a massive mobile made of hundreds of frames, suspended in a gallery space. Then, we motion tracked and mapped each frame allowing us to dynamically composite peoples’ photos within the film. The result was a personalized sculpture of your memories with friends that brings your story on Facebook to life in an intimate way. Your cluster of floating memories was unique only to you, and visualized your social graph on Facebook. For the soundtrack, we collaborated with singer-songwriter Cat Power to cover the iconic Beatles song, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

Your Story of Friendship was created by integrating live-action film with dynamic personalization, video compositing and code based rendering. To do this, we used corner pinning data to motion track each photo frame-by-frame, enabling your photos to move seamlessly within the film. Then, we used new technology to achieve the lens blurs and blending that make the lighting of each photo feel as real as possible. All of this innovative back-end code helps each film come to life in a magical way.

Over the course of the project, we created more than 67 million personalized films containing over 4 billion photos celebrating peoples’ friendships. Most importantly, this little gift from Facebook helped people take a moment to remember just how much our friends mean to us all.

Over the course of the project, we created more than 67 million personalized films containing over 4 billion photos celebrating peoples’ friendships. Your Story of Friendship used innovative new production techniques, integrating live-action film with dynamic, personalization, video compositing and code based rendering. All of this innovative back-end code helped bring each film to life making it feel like your photos were actually there in the space. Most importantly, this little gift from Facebook helped people take a moment to remember just how much our friends mean to us all.