Keynote and Powerpoint both offer a lot of options for basic animation. Choose from pre-made effects, or create your own by controlling the appearance of objects over time. Both programs operate on a principle of keyframe animation (a scaled down version of what you find in programs like After Effects). Basically, this means that you don’t need to draw out every frame of animation. if you want a circle to go from the left to the right side of your page in 5 seconds, you can place it at the left side at the beginning and the right side 5 seconds later, and the program fills in the rest. This makes it easy to make a flowchart go left to right or up and down, to make bullet points appear, or to make icons or shapes travel a path. You’re really only limited by your imagination. If there’s something you want to do, but can’t figure out how, drop me a line, and I’ll walk you through it.
Keynote:
Inserting Icons and Shapes, and Drawing Your Own:
Keynote offers a wide variety of shapes and icons in the shape menu on the toolbar (if the shape menu is not on your toolbar, go to view -> customize toolbar). You can also use the pen tool to draw your own shapes (the pen tool is to the right of search or at the bottom of the shape menu, depending on the version of Keynote you’re using). The pen tool takes some getting used to if you’ve never worked with design software, but it doesn’t take long to master. Click to draw a series of points for straight lines and angles. For curves, click and drag. You can adjust curved lines by dragging the handles that appear.
Change shapes you have inserted or drawn by selecting them and then going to format -> shapes and lines -> make editable. This will allow you to pull in one corner of a box, for example, or distort a circle.
Join or break apart shapes in the arrange tab of the format panel. Select two shapes and choose unite to make them one shape, intersect to make a new shape out of the overlap, subtract to remove the top shape and overlap, and exclude to delete just the overlapping area. To temporarily unite shapes in a way that can be undone later, choose group objects instead. This is a powerful way to make almost any shape you can imagine.
Transform Properties:
Keynote allows you to transform position, opacity, rotation, and scale (as well as apply many pre-made animations). These controls are in the Animate panel under the Action tab (See previous posts for information about building in and out, and build order).
To animate position, select the desired shape and choose Move. A red line will appear showing where the object will move. Drag that line in whatever direction you choose, and make it longer or shorter. For greater control, check the box that reads “Align to Path.” You can then either draw a path or define the path using a pre-made shape. For example, if you wanted a circle to travel the edges of a triangle, you would insert the triangle, and the circle, with the circle where you want it to start moving. Select both shapes, then go to Format -> Shapes and lines -> Make Motion Path from Shape. Keynote will ask you to select which shape is the path, and it will then move the other object along that shape. Control the speed, duration, and direction of the animation from the action tab.
Control Opacity, Rotation, and Scale in the action tab. Opacity controls how opaque or transparent an object is (how much you can see through it), rotation controls how much something spins, and scale controls its size. Most of the pre-made Build In and Build Out techniques use a combination of these to achieve an effect. For example, when something bounces in, grows large, and zooms off the page, it is using Move and Scale. You can apply multiple techniques in combinations of your own choosing and/or apply dozens of pre-made animations to achieve whatever effect you desire. Additionally, you can apply Transitions between slides. See previous post for a discussion of the Magic Move Transition.
Powerpoint:
Inserting Icons and Shapes, and Drawing Your Own:
From the Insert menu, click Shapes or Icons to choose from a large library. To draw your own shapes, click on the “Freeform: Scribble” tool under Shapes.
To join or break apart shapes: Select two shapes, click Shape Format on tool bar (this appears when two shapes are selected). Click the Insert Shapes Group Button (this may or may not say Merge Shapes, depending on what version of Powerpoint you’re using) and choose Unite, Intersect, Subtract, or Exclude (see definitions above) or Fragment, which breaks the shapes into two separate shapes.
Animate on a path: Click Add Animation -> Motion Paths to choose predefined paths. Choose Custom to draw your own. Control specifics of timing, duration, and delay in the animation pane and on the toolbar. Choose Effect Options from the toolbar to change the direction of the animation.
To animate opacity, scale, or rotation: go to Add Animation -> More Emphasis Effects. In Powerpoint, these effects are called Grow, Spin, and Transparency. You can also add extra built in effects from this panel.
As with Keynote, you can apply multiple effects of your own design as well as choose from a large library of pre-built effects. You can also use pre-made transitions between slides (see previous post for discussion on the Morph Transition for animating seamlessly between slides).
Substance and Style 