One of the internal vision pieces that fed into this work focused on the Cadmus NPU chip across both Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. It was a way to test how the broader AI story could hold together before the final launch films were in place.

That video pulled together a wide range of feature moments, including the Cadmus experience across Windows, the 2X performance claim over Apple M3, all-day battery life, updated Windows Studio Effects, the detachable keyboard, Cocreator in Paint, AI Super Resolution for gaming, and the OLED displays. A lot of that thinking carried forward into the final Surface Pro film.

This project had a longer runway than most. The work started back in 2022 with an internal video that explored the earliest version of the story we were trying to tell.

That first piece included the Cadmus chip, Cocreator in Paint, Background Denoise, and the detachable Bluetooth keyboard. Not everything stayed the same, but a lot of those ideas eventually found their way into the final video in one form or another.

Recall ended up being one of the most important features across the Copilot+ PC videos, and this Surface Pro piece was the first version we developed. The core idea was strong, a searchable visual history of what had happened on the device, but getting that idea to work on screen took a lot of iteration.

I started with 2D screens to work out the UI and the pacing. Then I pushed the sequence into 3D, but the early attempts were not landing the way they needed to. The structure was there, but the motion and readability were still off.

From there, I rebuilt the sequence with art direction, created new versions, and kept refining the UI until the flow finally clicked. Once that was working, I converted the final version into a full 3D story. That Surface Pro sequence became the foundation for the three Recall variants that followed in the Surface Laptop and broader Copilot+ PC videos.