Every friendship is different, and each is worth celebrating. So, we created a new kind of film that combined user generated content and visual storytelling to celebrate all of the unique people and friendships across the United Kingdom. The film was designed specifically for Facebook and would be personalized for everyone in the UK and delivered to peoples’ News Feed as a gift from Facebook. The result was a first-of-its-kind film that celebrated you, your friends and some of the most meaningful moments you’ve shared together on Facebook.

Your Story of Friendship is a personalized film that celebrates 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 is unique only to you, and visualizes 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.” Millions of personalized films were then generated and delivered to peoples’ News Feed across the UK.

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.

Facebook is a place where we share life's moments in real time. But as we all post more of our photos and memories on Facebook, we wanted to find a way to use them to surprise and delight people by resurfacing some of these shared moments with friends. So, decided to create a gift for everyone—something personal that we could give them that captures a unique sense of joy and connection with their friends and makes them think about Facebook in a new way.

Facebook has been a part of our lives for years now. And as we all share more photos and memories with friends we wanted to create something that allowed people to reflect on and celebrate those friendships. With a broad audience of Facebook users in the United Kingdom, ages 18-54, we challenged ourselves to create a personalized film that would resonate with each and every one of them.