How To Create Simple Animation With Mac Keynote

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create a simple animation using Keynote on your Mac.

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So you may think of Keynote as a presentation tool and that's primarily what people use it for. But you could also use it to create simple animations. You can have the animations just on a slide during a presentation or you could build an animation just for its own sake to use as an animated GIF or to maybe insert in a video you're making.

I'm starting off here with just a single slide in a Keynote presentation and there are some shapes on it. I've got a blue rectangle here. I have a narrow gray rectangle here to represent a little road. I've got a brown rectangle that's actually using the gradient fill to go from two shades of brown and I have a shape here, just a mountain shape. I went to Insert a Shape here and I just searched for mountain and used that shape there and then changed its color. Now you don't have to use shapes. You can bring in graphics from a graphics app or photos or anything that you want. I'm just using shapes here to keep things simple.

I could add another shape, that of a car and I want to have that car race across the road. I'll take that car and put it on the road for now. I can change its color to whatever I want and shrink it down maybe a little bit and stick it there on the road. Now I want to have it animate from left to right. To do that I need to create a path for it to animate on. To create a path you want to create a shape. You want to go to Basic Shapes. You could use either a line or you can click here on the pen tool to draw a more complex path. I'm just going to use a simple line here. I'm going to move the right side of the line off of the right side here and the left side off of the left side. Now with the line selected I want to Shift Click the car so I have both the car and the line selected.

Then I'm going to go to Format. Then Shape and Lines and make and then Make Motion Path From Shape. It's then going to ask me to click on which shape I want to be the path. So I'll click on the line and you can see it even changes to red as I move my cursor over it. Once I've done that you can see the car now appears on the left side and the right side of the line. Now I'm going to click off here and then click the line again. The line remains there as an independent item. I'm going to hit the Delete key to delete it. The path is still there with the car. 

So if I click on the car, which is now on its starting position on the left you could see I get a little red diamond. Click on the red diamond and it shows me the full path for the car. If I click on Animate for the sidebar here, and make sure I have Action selected, you could see it's set to move. I could hit the Preview button and I can preview the car moving across the road. 

Now I can change some things. I can change the duration. So I can maybe make it 3 seconds instead of 1 second. I can also change the acceleration. I want the car to move at a consistent speed. So I don't want to do an ease in or ease out or anything. Just None. I can test again with Preview. Now I can see it move. It's not quite on the road anymore as the center of the car is lining up with the center of the line. So when I click off and then I click on the car again this time not showing the path and I'm going to move it up a little bit. So just use the up arrow. If I click on the line there you can see it moved the entire line up. I can Preview it and I can see it move across, on the road, just like I wanted. So I've animated my first item.

Let's add the second animated element to this scene. I want to go to Shape here and I'm going to search for the sun. I come up with this graphic here. I'm going to put it in the sky. Make it a little bit bigger and maybe also color it appropriately. The idea is I want to have the sun set. So I want to start up here above the image. If you can't see enough you can always zoom out more to see more of the area around it. So I'm going to have it start here. I'm going to add a shape. Do a basic shape. Do a line. Then take one part of the line and stick it all the way up here. The other part of the line put below. Then I'm going to select both like I did before. Do Format, Shapes and Lines, Make Motion Path from Shape. Click on the shape there. Let me click on the line and get rid of that. Click on the sun here and let's animate this. 

You can see it's the sun rising. I did that on purpose because I want to show you how to switch this. So I'm going to click on the red line here and all I need to do is just basically drag the points to other ends here. So now it should animate in the right way. I can preview it now and you can see the sun sets. But I want to have it set behind the mountains and the ground obviously. So what I'm going to do here is click outside to get away from the animation. Click on the sun and I can send it back. So I'm going to do Arrange, Send it Back but I want it to be in front of the background there. So I'm going to move it temporarily. I'm just going to go to Arrange and then Bring Forward. You can see it's Option Shift Command F if I need to do it a bunch of times. So that's enough to bring it forward in front of blue here. But you can see it's behind the mountains and behind the ground. So now I can position it wherever I want again and preview it. You can see it sets behind the mountains. I also want to set the acceleration to None again and change this duration to something slower, a few seconds there, like that. 

Now that I have two animations though I need to control when each one happens relative to the other. So I'm going to go and click on the Build Order button at the bottom of the Action sidebar. I'll see both of the things I want to animate here. I can click on each one and it selects it. So this makes it a handy way to select those items especially when they are hard to select because they're behind other things or kind of semi-hidden.

So I can see first it's going to do the car and that's going to start on a click. I don't want it to do that. I want it to start immediately right after the transition. Then it's going to do the sun and I want that to actually happen. I could do it with Build 1 so it happens at the same time that the car is moving or after. In this case I want to do it after. So it puts the two of them together but it has a line separating them. So now I can hit the Preview button at the bottom of this and I can see both things happen in their proper order. So the car will move across first and then the sun will set. 

So far we've got two things that move. But animation could be more than just movement. For instance we could have something fade in or out or change in some other way. I'm going to take this blue sky here. It would be cool if the blue sky faded away as the sun set and revealed what's behind it. What's behind it? Well I have a black rectangle behind it and a bunch of little white circles to represent stars. So if the blue would fade away you'd end up with the night sky. That would be a nice effect to have as the sun sets. 

I'm going to select animate for the sidebar and Action. Then Add an Effect. Instead of doing a Move effect I'm going to do Opacity here and you can see it fades out. I'm going to actually have it fade to zero, disappear completely. I can do acceleration. I'll set that to None. Then I'll click on Build Order to bring that up again. So I could see here I've got the car moving. I've got the sun set and I've got the rectangle here change in opacity. That'll happen afterwards so I want to set it to happen after Build 2. So now let's look at what happens when I preview. You can see the car race by. The sun sets and then the sky fade to black. 

Now if I wanted the fading to actually start earlier what I could do is instead of saying after Build 2 do it with Build 2. Now that will have the sky turn to black as the sun is setting. That's not exactly what I want. But I could add a delay here. So I know the sun setting takes 3 seconds. That's what I set it to. So I can say let's have a delay of two seconds. So the first two seconds the sun is setting and the rectangle stays fully opaque. Then in the last second it starts fading out. So now let's preview it. So there's the car. There's the sun and the sky is still blue and now just at the end there the sky fades and you get the stars.

Now I want to show you what happens when you have a more complex path. Let's select the rectangle here and hit the delete key to get rid of that so it's just going to stay a blue sky. I'm going to select the sun here and what I'm going to do is take this line and use this dot here in the middle to change the path by clicking on it and then dragging it and make a curved path for the sun. I actually have the start point and the end point and this curved path here. So let's go and make the start point over here. Make the end point over here. We could change the curve to be here in the middle. Now we could do something like that. We can preview it and see that we get the car and then the sun goes up and over. 

If we wanted to we could make the path even more complex. Notice if I move the cursor in-between the points I get more curve. So I could do things like that and that and make it all sorts of crazy kind of curvy things. Now you're really going to get a strange path for the sun. You could also start off with an odd path. So I'm going to go to Change here and change to None to remove the actual path for the sun. Here it is now just behind the ground where it started. So I could create a path here by to Shape, clicking the Pen Tool and then I could draw all sorts of things. So i could have it start here and you can set new straight lines like that. Do a crazy path like that. Then I'll just double click here at the end. I'm finished. Select both the sun and the line. Then do Format, Shapes and Lines, Make Motion Path. Click on that. Remove the line. I'll select the sun I can barely see it there. I can see it's path like that and edit it if I want. I can Preview it too.

If instead I wanted something to rotate I could click Add an Effect and say Rotate. I can set it to whether it is clockwise or counter clockwise. How much to rotate or just set the number of rotations. So I can have it do, say, ten rotations. So now when I preview it you see it spins pretty quickly. Let's go and change this to 30 seconds and you can see now it spins a little slower. Change the ease in and ease out so it's a consistent speed and you get a little rotation like that. 

To have the sun rotate while the car is racing by I'm going to bring in the Build Order again. I'm going to move the sun up here and you can see I can move it here with the car set to start after the transition with no delay. Set the car to start not after Build 1 but with Build 1 with no delay. When I go to Preview the sun is rotating while the car is racing across. 

Then, of course, I can combine movement with this. So I can click on the sun here and I can create a line like I had before. You know set that up so the sun moves and sets maybe here at an angle. Set it to Make Motion Path. Delete the line. Let's move this up there a little bit. You can see here in the Build Order I have two suns here. The sun rotate and the sun move. I can move this up here and have the sun will rotate after the transition. It will start with Build 1 and the car will start with Build 1 as well. Let's change the move so it does it a little slower like over 5 seconds. Now when I preview it you could see the sun will set and rotate at the same time. 

So in addition to movement, opacity, and rotation you can also scale objects over time. By combining all those there's really a lot you can do to move objects around. What you really can't do is have framed based animation, a character walk across the screen and you see their legs move. But there's still a lot you can do in Keynote without having to jump to a more professional animation tool.