The world isn't short on advice about how people can become happier. But sometimes, written advice doesn't encourage people to make hard changes in their lives. So "The Science of Happiness," a web video series from Soul Pancake took a different storytelling approach to this.

Instead of reporting the dry results of psychology research, the producers tape episodes in their studio that loosely reproduce academic research experiments for a YouTube audience.



The resulting 12 episodes, which concluded airing in October are inspiring and motivating.

“We all want to be happy. There’s so much research that has been done about the little ways that you can be happier,” says Mike Bernstein, 26, the filmmaker who lead the series. “We thought--why not give people something that won’t take them long to watch but will have a thematic, practical value to it?”

The episodes are more fun-with-science than actual controlled experiments. And the filmmakers had to select studies that could be reproduced on camera, which isn't always easy, and not every result comes out as expected.

Nevertheless, their success is evident: Reading about how it's healthy to express gratitude and seeing someone's face light up on screen are two very different experiences.

When Bernstein moved onto romance, he found it to have even more potential, because real-life romance usually happens in private, and many wonder if what they're thinking and feeling is normal. “Our best moments on the show, are typically when...there is a moment of connection between two people who really care about each other,” he says. “We’re going to try to do for love what we do for happiness.”