Hello, and welcome to another Quick Lessons video with me, Jacob Woolcock. Today, I’m going to show you how to create your own sunrise and sunset animations using the Keynote app on your iPad. Here’s an example of what we’re going to try and make by the end of this quick lesson.
Your scene can be however you imagine it to be, but the idea is that the sun will come up and then go down, revealing night-time in that scene. To make this work, we’re going to use Keynote and create a new workspace that’s ready to go. Then, we’re going to create a daytime version of our scene. I’ll show you how to bring on objects and symbols, recolour, resize, and rotate them, and create a really lovely landscape.
Next, in step number three, we’re going to add the Magic Move animation. We’ll then change our daytime scene to make it turn into night-time by altering some of the colours and the layout. Your animation will then come to life before your very eyes.
Lastly, in step number five, we’ll save this and export it as a movie that you can share elsewhere.
All you need for this tutorial is an iPad with the Keynote app installed. You don’t need a stylus, an Apple Pencil, or anything like that—just an iPad and your imagination. Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s jump straight in with step number one!
To begin with, let’s open up the Keynote app. From here, we’ll create a new blank presentation. Go into the theme browser and choose a plain white slide this time. When your presentation opens, tap and drag your finger over the three text boxes, then press Delete. This will leave you with a lovely blank workspace to begin.
At this stage, it’s worth giving your presentation a name. Tap at the top where it says Presentation and type in something like Day to Night Animation—something you’ll be able to find easily if you ever need to go back to it in the future.
Once you’ve done that, press the plus (+) button in the top-right corner of your screen and take a look at the objects built into Keynote. There are hundreds of different objects and symbols available here. Take a moment or two to explore them and start imagining how they could be used in your scene later on.
Finally, for step number one, we’re going to change the background colour of our slide to a nice blue sky for a sunny day. Press on the format paintbrush, go to Slide Background, and swipe across to see all the different colour options. Here, I’m going to choose that lovely blue shade.
Let’s pause for a moment here while you explore the symbols in Keynote and change the background colour of your new slide. We’ll move on when you’re ready.
So now it’s time to start building out our scene to make it more than just a plain blue page. I’m going back to the plus (+) button, and in the object browser, I’m going to search for a cloud that I spotted earlier. When that cloud appears in Keynote, its colour probably won’t be what you’d want for a cloud. So, tap on the object, press the format paintbrush, and recolour it from there. I’m going for white or a very pale grey to make my cloud look realistic.
Next, I’ll copy and paste the cloud and resize them to add more than one cloud to my page. Here’s a great tip: you can flip objects horizontally or vertically to add variety. To do this, press the format paintbrush, go to the Arrange tab, and choose to flip horizontally or vertically. Flipping the cloud makes it look slightly different from the others, so it doesn’t seem like I’ve just copied and pasted the same cloud everywhere, even though I have. Along with resizing and repositioning, this adds some variety to the sky.
Next, I want to add some ground at the bottom of my screen. Back in the shape browser, I’m going to search for a mountain. You don’t have to use a mountain—you can choose whatever works for your scene—but I’ll demonstrate with the mountain shape. When I bring it onto my page and start resizing it, you’ll notice that it gets wider while keeping the same aspect ratio as it gets taller—in other words, it scales proportionally. However, I want to stretch it sideways without making it taller.
To do this, I’ll tap on the format paintbrush, go to the Arrange tab, and turn off the toggle for Constrain Proportions. Now, I can grab the side of the mountains and stretch them out wide to fill the page. At this point, the mountains look less like mountains and more like rugged hills in the background. I’ll make them green, then copy and paste them to create another row of hills behind the first.
For my new hills, I’ll make them a slightly darker shade of green. To do this, I’ll use the format panel at the top, then go to Arrange and move the layer backwards by one step. Drag the little marker one step to the left, and the background hills will now sit behind the original hills. I’ll repeat this process one more time by pasting the mountains again, making them an even darker green, and arranging them behind the other two layers. I’ll also line them up carefully so it’s not obvious that it’s the same symbol used three times. This layering creates a lovely sense of depth.
Now that I’ve added clouds in the sky and some hills on the ground, I think it’s time to add the sun. I’ll repeat the same steps as before, so I won’t go through them in detail now. When you add the sun symbol, make sure to use the Arrange tab on the format panel to move it behind the clouds so it fits naturally into the scene.
Feel free to add any other elements you want to build out your scene. The more you add, the better it will look—but remember, sometimes less is more. It’s all about what works best for you.
This is your time to explore and be creative, so go ahead and build an amazing daytime scene. Think about clouds, sunshine, and the ground. Off you go!
Now we’re getting to the kind of fun stuff with the animation. So, tap onto the thumbnail of your slide on the left-hand side and tap onto Transition. From here, on that new toolbar, you want to add a transition, and you’re going to choose Magic Move. Now, when you go on there and come off that screen, you’ll get a little message that comes up asking if you want to duplicate that slide. Tap on Duplicate, and that will make a second version of your slide identical to the first one. I’ll tell you why in a moment.
We’re now going to do exactly the same thing on that second slide. So, tap onto there again and add another Magic Move transition. Once more, we’re going to duplicate that slide.
Okay, let’s come out of animation mode and press Play on that top toolbar and see what happens. And… absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing has happened. But don’t worry—that’s exactly what’s meant to happen. Confusing, eh? Well, let me explain.
What the Magic Move transition does is it looks at the different objects on each page of your presentation, and it will then magically move the objects between them if they’ve changed. Now, because we’ve got three slides that are all exactly the same, nothing has changed, which means no movement is happening. If I go into that second slide and just move my sun from one side of the screen to the other, and then go back and press Play, watch what suddenly happens. That sun moves from its position on slide number one to its new position on slide number two, and then back to its position on slide number three again at the end.
We’ve now created an animation by doing absolutely no hard work! But now the fun can begin in step number four.
Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes to duplicate your slides and add the Magic Move transition, and when you’re ready, we’ll start step number four together.
Let’s go back to slide number two now, which is going to become our night-time scene. To make it really apparent straight away that we’re changing it, we’ll go to the Format Paintbrush and change the slide background colour to something more like a night-time blue—a nice dark, rich navy blue, perhaps. Straight away, we can see this is going to be our night-time scene.
Obviously, at night-time we don’t need the sun in place, so let’s drag it to the bottom of the screen, off the page, even underneath the mountains. That way, when it animates, it will rise up like a sunrise. Drag that right down to the bottom for me. Next, we’re going to move some of the clouds around as well. Make sure you zoom out of your slide so you can see the empty space around your page, as that will come in handy. Relocate your clouds so they’re completely off-screen. When you’re doing this, remember that they’re going to slide between the positions on the different slides, so don’t move them to the bottom of your screen. Keep them on the same horizontal line but move them to either the left or right side. The further off-screen you move them, the further they’ll have to travel, which means they’ll move faster in your animation later. You can experiment with this a little—you could even change the scale by resizing some clouds so they grow or shrink as they move on.
At the moment, our hills are quite a bright shade of green for night-time, so let’s tap onto them and make them much, much darker. I’ll go into my colour mixer this time and bring the brightness slider down so each one is a much darker shade of green. Now it starts to look a lot more like night-time, which is great!
Let’s add a moon next. Add a new symbol, grab the moon, and place it wherever you want on the screen. We’ll make the moon a nice “moony” colour—whatever that is! I’d say a pale yellow. Then, I’ll add some stars using the same colour. With the stars, I’ll make them teeny-tiny on the screen by zooming in and shrinking them down. After that, I’ll copy and paste them all over the place.
Now you can really experiment here and explore what Magic Move can do. Some things you could try include changing colours, changing sizes, repositioning objects, and rotating them. Any of these changes will be animated automatically by Keynote as long as the same object exists on both slides.
Now, we’ve added the moon to slide number two, but it doesn’t exist on slide one or slide three, so right now it won’t animate. Let’s fix that by copying and pasting the moon onto slide one and slide three. We don’t want the moon in the sky in the daytime, so I’ll move it off-screen—one to the left-hand side and one to the right-hand side. That way, it will animate as though it’s moving across the sky, which should look lovely.
The stars on slide two will be fine because if Keynote can’t find a matching object on a different slide, it will gradually fade those objects in, which looks lovely for night-time stars. Now, if I go back to slide number one and press Play in the toolbar, your animation will come to life, and you should see your scene transition from day to night and back to day again.
Take some time here to craft your night-time scene and check how the animation looks before moving on to step number five. I’m here waiting when you’re ready!
Before we export our animation as a movie, I want to make a couple of changes to improve how it looks. First, tap on the thumbnail of the first slide and go to Transition. From here, tap on Magic Move and adjust some properties.
Firstly, let’s make the animation last a bit longer so it appears more gradual. Drag the Duration slider to around 8 or 10 seconds. Secondly, where it says Acceleration, tap on that and choose None so the animation moves at a constant speed.
Once you’ve done that, tap off here completely, go to slide number two, and repeat the process. Tap on Transition, go to Magic Move, and make the same adjustments—change the duration to make it longer and set the acceleration to None.
Now, when I press the Play button, the animation will take a little longer and be much smoother, making it look more natural.
Once you’re happy with the animation and have finished tweaking your scenes, it’s time to export. Press the three dots in the top-right corner, go down to Export, and choose Movie. On this page, you’ll see a few settings to adjust. I recommend setting the animation to start after a Zero Second Delay so it plays automatically. Then, press Export.
The final step is to save your movie. Once saved, open the Photos app, and your film should be there, ready to play and share!
All right, well done for getting this far, for following all five steps, and hopefully now you’re going to have some time to finish off your animations. We’ve learned all about Magic Move today, we’ve learned about how you can transition between objects in Keynote and what properties you can change to make that animation look really spectacular.
I hope you’ve had fun making this! If you enjoyed that and you want to take your Keynote work to a whole other level, I’d really suggest checking out this video from my friend Ben Hayden. He is amazing in Keynote, and some of the scenes he builds will really inspire you. Of course, you can build your own scene in his style and then animate it using Magic Move as well.
As always, I would love to see what you’ve made, so if you’re able to, please do share on Twitter or Instagram using Quick Lessons, or find me and tag me in it as well. And if you want some more Quick Lessons, do check out the other videos on the screen now or subscribe to my channel, where there are loads more Quick Lessons and iPad tips just waiting for you over there.
Until next time, take care.