Hello developers! I’m Steve De Mar, the Product Designer for the WinFS team and I’m here to talk about the WinFS video at the PDC (high-res, low-res). It started with the WinFS team’s desire to spread the word about our platform value propositions, ’Unify’, ‘Organize’, ‘Explore’ and ‘Innovate’.

The video started as a joint venture with a video vendor to define an excitement piece. Originally all I was to do was design the application UI’s and direct the story. But in a crunch to meet stylistic demands, we decided to rework the entire video less than 10 days before PDC. That meant I’d have to refine the footage we’d already created to shorten and intensify the experience. This involved new script, sourcing new music, on-screen text instead of voice-over, reanimating sections, pacing and editing. Suffice it to say, many long nights and lots of intense iterations later, and we have the WinFS video you saw at the PDC. Hope you enjoyed the effort!

Beyond entertainment value though, one of the most important aspects of the video is the experiences represented in the application UI’s. Our goal was to peak the curiosity of you, the developers, to get you thinking about what could really be built on WinFS. We wanted you to see how WinFS enables a totally new class of user experiences. The UIs in the video are all based on some of the great prototype applications that have already been developed for the WinFS platform. Although we cast them in a more futuristic visual “theme” to fit the style of the video, the functionality we showed exists in the prototypes that either we’ve developed in house or we’ve seen others develop on WinFS. A number of these were demo’d at the PDC, and we've more on the way which you should be hearing about shortly.