Master These 5 Basic Keynote Animations

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are five animation types that you should master to get the most out of Keynote. 

In Keynote it is pretty easy to add a basic transition from one slide to the next. But after that you're going to want to master animations that make things move around on a slide. Here are five different types of animations. Once you master these you are well on your way to being able to do all sorts of different things in Keynote. 

Now a slide typically has many different objects. But instead of having them all appear at once on the slide you can have them appear one at a time. So this is what we want to have happen. We want these to come in one right after the other automatically. No clicking necessary. This will draw the audience's eye each item as it appears. Let me add three objects to this slide. I'm going to use text but you can use shapes, photos, or whatever you want (placing on slide). Now when we arrive at the slide all three of these would just appear. But you can have them appear one-at-a-time by adding an animation to each one. So I'm going to select all of them and I'm going to go to the Animate Sidebar here. I'm going to use Bulid-in since this is an animation we want to use to make them appear on the slide in the first place. Then I'm going to add an Effect. You have all these different Effects here. You can play around with them. You can use Preview here to see what they each do. We're just going to use something pretty simple here and just have them Dissolve In one at a time, like that. Now it may look as if we've just done it. That we're finished. But we want to go to the Build Order first and see exactly how each of these is going to come in. 

It's this button here at the bottom right, but you can also go to View and then Show Build Order and it brings up this little window here that shows all of the objects and which animation's apply. In this case we see that each of the three text fields and we see that each is set to dissolve. We also see here at the bottom how they start. Each one of them is going to start when you click. So this won't actually animate like we want. We can go to Start here and have them start After the Previous Build. We inspect just the first one we can see it says Start After the Transition since there is nothing before it. If we look at the second one we see starts after Build One and that's exactly what we want to have happen. We could have it happen at the same time as Build One but we want it to happen after it. So the next one will happen after Build Two. We can add a delay for each one if we want to pause between each of them appearing. When we preview this we will see each one appears one right after the other with no click. We can test it by playing this slide and see that is how it happens. 

Next, let's look at Magic Move. Magic Move lets you do complex animation by simply designing one slide to be the start state and the second slide to be the end state. But you can actually link these together so you can build an animation by having a series of slides that automatically go from one to the other. So here's what we are going for here. We've got four images here and I want to be able to click and focus on the first one, click again and go to the second, the third, and the fourth. This seems like it is a lot of complex animation but actually it is very easy to do. 

So let's go and import some images here. I'm going to click the media tool here and I'm going to import some photos. You can drag and drop some photos in or use shapes or text or whatever you want. I'm going to just add some photos right here, like this one, this one, let's add this one, and this one. Now I'm going to arrange them so each is in a corner (arranging). So now I've got each of these four pictures here. What I'm going to do is create a second version of this slide. I can go to Edit and Duplicate Selection with this selected or just Command D. Now I've got two slides. On the second slide I'm going to make this one much larger but not fill the entire thing. I'm going to recenter it here so it is right in the middle. I can still see the other images so the audience understands these are the ones I'm going to talk about next but this one now is the center of attention. So I can just go from this slide to this slide and accomplish that. But I would like an animation to transition from here to here.

The easiest way to do that is with Magic Move. So once you have two slides like this that have the same elements on them and they are, in fact, the same four elements just one has moved in its size and location, now we can use Magic Move. Go to the first slide here. Go to Animate and Add Effect and select Magic Move. So now what happens is it's going from this slide to the next one, it's going to resize and move. If I Play here and then click to go to the next slide you can see it does that animation. But I want it to do more than just that one. So I'm going to go back to this first slide here and I can duplicate it. I'm going to hold the Option Key down and drag it here to make another copy of it. Let's get rid of the Effect there, clear that out. I'm actually going to create four more of these because I want this second one to focus on this particular item and I'll move that to the center here. We want this to be on top of the others so I'll Arrange and Bring to Front. Then this next one here is going to be this. I will enlarge that and then put that in the middle. I will also arrange and bring to front. Then this one here will be the bottom right. Make that the right size, about there. Bring that to the middle and that's the one all the way to the back. But I'm going to arrange, Bring to Front. Then I want to go back to this when I'm done talking about all of them. 

So now I've got a slide for each one of these. I can continue with these Magic Moves by simply selecting the other slides. I'll select all four of these and I can apply Magic Move to them all at once. Watch what happens now as I go through these slides. I start here, Magic Move will then bring this one to the center and enlarge it. Then the next one will shrink this and bring the next one to the front, and so on like that. Then even the last one. So I've created this pretty complex set of animations just by setting up these slides like I want. The four here and then the Start and the End are the same and adding Magic Move to the first five of them.

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Now this next animation is probably exactly what you think of when I say animation. That's have something move along a path on the slide. So as an example here we're going to make a plane fly across the screen following a curve like this. To demonstrate this I'm going to add a shape. You can click here to add a shape but you can also use a photo, you can import your own graphic, you can use text. Whatever you want. I'm going to select Transportation here and then I'm going to select an airplane, like this. Let's make it a little bit bigger. I want to animate it. Move it from one spot to another. To do that I can go to Animate here. Now I don't want to use Build-In. That's having it appear on the slide. Build-Out has it exit the slide at the end. I want it to move which will be an Action while the slide is being shown. I can Add an Effect and the first one here is Move. I selected that and you can see the plane moves from the left to the right. I have now this red line here. I can grab the squares at either end of the red line and set the start point and the end point. I can even, if I want, zoom out and set the end point to beyond the edges of the slide. I can also grab this dot in the middle and create a curve. As a matter of fact I can grab other dots here and really refine the curve however I want. I can even select a dot, like this one, and delete to delete it. So I can have this curve here like that. I can preview here to see the animation. 

I can set the duration so let's slow this down a bit. Have it take two seconds to go along this path. I can also align to the path. Note now if I preview it the plane is always facing directly to the right. But if I align to the path and I preview you can see how it points in the direction it is traveling. I can have acceleration ease in, in other words start slowly, speedup and then out. So slow down at the end. Or I can have it only ease in or ease out or do none. None means it moves at a constant speed like that. Instead of on-click I would say after the transition. So now as soon as you get to the slide with no further action the animation happens.

Now one type of animation that is not accounted for by the move is spinning an object. That's rotating it but fully around, maybe several times. So as an example we're going to make this soccer ball spin, like this. If we choose a shape here, like in Activities here this soccer ball, and we want the soccer ball to spin, we would go to Animate and go to Action and Add an Effect. There is an effect called Rotate. If I preview it here you can see it turns the ball slightly. If I select it, I can select that it goes clockwise instead of counter clockwise. But it is only going to go 45 degrees. What we actually want is to set that at zero but instead set the rotations to some number. So let's have it rotate, say, ten times. Now when we preview it we can see it rotates to ten times and does it over this duration. Let's slow it down to ten seconds. So one rotation per second. So now you can see it move around like that. If I change the acceleration to None it will do it at an even rate, like that. You are limited in your duration. You can go to 60 seconds but you can't go beyond 60 seconds. It's locked there. So I can go, say, 60 rotations in 60 seconds. After 60 seconds it will freeze in place. 

Now the final thing you need to master is combining multiple animations. So what we're going for here is to have an object not just move but also scale and rotate all at the same time to create a single animation and it will look something like that. So we're going to start by selecting this football here. We're actually going to have the football start off the left side down here and we're going to add an effect and a move. What we're going to do is have the end at the upper right. We're going to have it curve a bit like that but we want to kind of have it look like it is coming bit towards us as well. So what we're going to do for that is we're going to add another Action. I'll click the Add Action here and I'll have it Scale as well. So now I get to set a scaling amount. I'll have it grow to 150% of its normal size. So I've actually got two builds going on at the same time. 

Let's go to View and then Show Build Order again. I'll see these two here. I've got this one happening on Click. Let's change it to After Transition. This one happens on Click as well. I'm going to have it go with Build One. So these two happen at the same time. It moves and scales at the same time. Notice for Move here it is happening over the period of one second. For Scale also one second. Which is good. That's what we want. Also, we have ease-in and ease-out for acceleration. Let's have it just ease-in. So it'll pick up speed and do the same thing for the scaling. So now these two things should happen at the same time. If we play this we can see the football comes from the bottom left, goes out the top right, and gets larger at the same time. We can keep going here with more. Let's add another Action here. I'm going to have it rotate. So have it kind of spin in the air a bit. I'll have it go clockwise and I'll have it spin, let's say, 270 degrees, like that and just ease-in. 

Now we need to go to the Build Order again and we want to make sure this rotation is happening with Build One. So all three of them are happening together. All taking one second and easing in. So let's try looking at it now. You can see how the football rotates, grows, and moves all at the same time. 

So practice each one of these with examples like I'm showing you here. I'll even include this example presentation at the post at macmost.com. Hope you find this useful. Thanks for watching.