The present specification describes systems and methods for automatically animating personalized blendshapes from three dimensional stereo reconstruction data. The disclosed inventions facilitate the animation of blendshapes using an optimization process that applies to a frame a fitting process to yield a set of weighted blendshapes and applies to that frame a temporal smoothing process to yield a another set of weighted blendshapes and repeats that optimization process for a predetermined number of iterations to yield a final set of weighted blendshapes.