Have you been wondering how to make an animated intro for your videos?
Well, have I got a treat for you today!
Hi, this is Teena Hughes from TeenaHughesOnline.com and I’m going to use some software which you probably already have on your computer. I’m using a Mac and I’m using Keynote.
If you don’t have a Mac, that’s okay.
You can use PowerPoint, which is another presentation software that you might have on your computer.
Ready? Let’s get started.
I’ve opened up keynote on my Mac and I’ve chosen the wide white theme. Once we’re in here, you’ll see that it’s a bit hard to read this text, but that’s okay – we’re going to get rid of it. The first thing I do is just click once on the page (off the text) and then I select Command A or Apple A. I press the delete key. Gone. Perfect.
The next thing I want to do is come up here to the left where it says Zoom and I’m going to say a “fit slide”, so now we can see the entire slide.
That’s much easier. I’m going to animate my logo, which is something that I can use at the start of a lot of videos. So that’s what I’m going to do now. I’m going to go find my logo and drag it onto the what slide that we see in front of us.
I can resize the logo once I’ve dragged it in.
It’s a .PNG and I’m going to leave it as it is for the moment, just for this exercise. So now we’re going to start doing some animation, but the very next thing I need to do is save the file. So I’m going to do that right now.
Okay the file has now been named and so I’m feeling confident to move forward. I always like to save every document just after I start working on it, so that there’s never going to be a problem with the system crashing or running out of memory, et cetera.
Okay, next thing we’re going to do is add our first animation.
To do that on the right hand side of the screen here, is Style, Image and Arrange. So if I click on Image and then above that I’m going to click on Animate. And here is where it says Build In, Action and Build Out.
We’re going to start with the build in. So that’s an action that’s going to happen to the logo. Then we’ll definitely have a build out one. I’m not sure yet about the action one in the middle, but we’ll see.
The first thing, let’s click on add an effect. Oh, and there’s so many. Let’s try Drop. Okay, that looks pretty good. Let’s go back and change it. See if there’s anything else we want to try, what to try out. Appear is always simple, so that’s good. I’m going to look and see what else is here. See if there’s something else. Oh, what about Swoosh? Oh, that’s nice.
And Fade and Scale, also good.
So all of these little animations are terrific.
You can play with each one and each one has its own settings below it so you can play around with those.
I’ve found one I was looking for! So excited, so I’m going to go back and choose that one. Hang on a tick.
When you get lost when making animations, it’s always a good idea to just go back and click on the image just once and then that will take you where you need to be.
So I’m coming back up you to Animate, and then I’m going to change Fade and Scale, and right down the bottom of the options, here is Anvil! I like Anvil.
See that little bit of smoke when it hit the ground there? Woohoo!
The next thing I want to do is I’m going to have a look at the Actions and see what I would like it to do next. So I’ve clicked on Action, I still have the image selected and now I’m clicking on Add an Effect. There are just a few options here. So what about Flip? Oh, I like that. Let’s try another one. Oh, I do like Jiggle and Pop. I must admit. What about Blink? Oh yeah. I think I’m going to go back to my original choice, which was Flip.
Cool.
Now to end the logo’s Action, let’s do a Build Out.
So making sure I’ve got the option clicked. I come back up here to the top right hand corner, click on Build Out, and then Add an Effect.
So these are the different things you can do. Now there are quite a few here,, all kinds of groovy things, but one that I quite like is Confetti. You know what? I think I’m going to go with that. Okay, so I’m happy with this.
I’m going to Save, because I like to save as I go.
And now I’m going to come up here and click on the Play button and preview.
That all looks great. You may have noticed that it was very slow, it didn’t start automatically. So each Action also needed to be started. So I was pressing the down arrow each time to get that happening.
So what I’m going to do now on the bottom of this page, I’m going to click on Build Order.
And this has the three actions that I set up:
- the Build In
- the Action
- and the Build Out.
So I’m going to click on the first one and you’ll notice that it has a “Start” at the bottom here. Instead of On Click, which means I have to click it to start it, I’m going to say After Transition.
With option number two, again, I’m going to say After Build 1, and on number three, I’m going to say After Build 2 and I’m going to click the preview button.
Fantastic! And I didn’t have to click anything to make that work. Just to see it look really cool, I’ll click the Play button. Yes, I’m liking that a lot.
Now the next thing I’m going to do is Export that, so File/Export to Movie.
We’re going to leave it as Self Playing. I’m not going to change anything. I’m just going to click Next is the name of it and it’s going into my folder. I’m happy with that, so I’m going to click Export and it’s done.
All right, let’s go to the desktop. I’ve sorted this by date, so we’ve got the keynote file, we’ve got the M4V, which is the video file. Okay I have opened up the M4V file, so let’s just play the video.
Fabulous!
I’m really happy with that. I hope you have a go at building your own little intro for your business and I look forward to hearing from you to see what you create.
Go ahead and post a Comment down below on YouTube and let me know if you’ve created one. Give me the link if you like it, I’ll go and have a look. I’d love to see it.
Otherwise you can also let me know on my website, TeenaHughesOnline.com and you can post a link there for me too so I can see what you’ve created.
That’s it for me for now. This is Teena Hughes saying Cheerio from TeenaHughesOnline.com – And I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick introduction into how to create an intro using keynote for Mac.
Bye bye!
