My Personalized Movies : novel system for automatically animating a movie based on personal data and evaluation of its impact on affective and cognitive experience

Abstract

Storytelling is a fundamental way in which human beings make sense of the world. Animated movies tell stories that engage audience across culture and age groups. I designed and built My Personalized Movies (MPM), a novel system where animated stories are automatically created based on data provided by individuals. The data include self-tracked mood and behavior captured in quantitative measures and descriptive text. MPM is designed to engage viewers through an emotive narrative, induce self-reflection about their mood and behavior patterns, and to improve self-compassion and self-esteem, which mediates behavior change. I demonstrate with a few stages of studies, involving in total 107 participants, that viewers show strong emotional engagement with MPM and can explicitly connect animated characters' stories to one's past experiences. An analysis of 22 participants' facial expression data during MPM reveals that participants' change in implicit self-esteem is positively correlated with the happiness of their facial expression. Participants with higher depression severity, as measured by PHQ9, showed less positive facial expression at the happy moments in the animation.