Ever since the release of our Sonoma theme for Keynote 2, we've received a lot of email asking us to explain how some of the slides in the Quicktime Sample were put together. It seems we blew a few of you away with that demo - so we thought we'd take this as an opportunity to open our bag of tricks and share a number of techniques all at once, in the context of a simple presentation build.

If you aren't familiar with the Quicktime Demo in question, you can click on the Quicktime preview window in the right-hand column to pull it up for a quick viewing. You can leave that window open to the side as a point of reference if you're going to follow along section-by-section.

Getting Started

If you have the Sonoma theme installed, you can follow along easily: just start a new Keynote document with Sonoma selected as the theme - we use the 800x600 resolution for our demos, but you can use either size as long as you bear in mind that your photo + masking proportions may look different than pictured if you use the 1024x version of the theme. We'll use the same photos used in the Quicktime demo for our demonstration here, and though the photo techniques can be used with any photos you have onhand, you can also find some of the primary images used for the demo on your own hard drive: if you have Tiger installed, go to the Finder and navigate to [hard drive] > Library > Desktop Pictures - you'll find the high-color imagery of the leaf, petal, agave and clownfish in the Plants and Nature subfolders respectively.

Slide #1

The first slide in each of our demos is what we refer to as the "glamour shot" - we use the same slide we model for the primary imagery on the theme page. In this case, the Sonoma glamour shot gives us a great opportunity to break down the Platform-style approach, as well as use of the new Masking Tool that makes the look + effects on this and the following slides possible.

If you're new to Sonoma, or haven't used one of our Platform-based themes before, the Platform concept is really quite simple: rather than building a traditional theme of flat imagery, gradients or solid colors to create the general style, we turn every slide in the theme into a Photo Cut-Out, letting background or background object changes drive portions of the overall design so that it's easy to make your own changes. You can't edit everything in a Platform theme - a portion of the layout is always "locked" in a manner of speaking, such as the grey backing + floating white panel "page" outline in Sonoma - so you can easily bring in your own stylistic touches, but you still have an overall order/design in play to keep everything looking sharp and consistent from slide to slide. In Sonoma's case, this lends itself well to using the platform frame as a masking device throughout a presentation: if you think in terms of layers, the blue portions of the screen are the back-most layer, with the white "page" portion of the design acting as a running photo cut-out, behind which you can place photos, color objects or even type to bring your own touches to the design.

So to build this first slide, we'll select the "Photo - 3-up With Title & Subtitle ALT" master from the Masters selector, and get ready to use the Masking tool to build our title mosaic. To start, we'll drop the Petals image in, which will form the left-most photo block on the finished slide. Once the photo is on the slide, send it to the back if it doesn't go to the back automatically (Arrange > Send to Back from the main menu), and you'll see the foreground platform take effect and reveal the petals image across the visible background regions. Since we're going to use this image in the left-most image block, we then size and position the image so that the final placement within that frame is where we'll want it when we apply the mask.

Once the image is sized and aligned, we want to mask it off to its image block so that it doesn't "spill over" into the neighboring blocks and muddy the layout. If you haven't added a Mask button to your Keynote toolbar (View > Customize Toolbar), you can access the Mask Tool directly from the main menu via Format > Mask while you have the image you want to mask selected. The Masking Tool should be self-explanatory - simply grab the selector boxes on the mask and drag the corners so that the mask covers the area you want to display. In this case, we're masking behind the platform cut-out, so it's really easy to simply size the mask to extend just beyond the left-most photo box + let the platform frame do the rest. Once your mask is sized, click outside of the image and the mask will take effect - hiding the overflow.

That's all there is to it: repeat that process for the other two images, place your title (we increase the font size for the title on this slide to 112 to make the type more dominant), and you're done. If you want to use the Running Text element on your slide - in this case, the "A delicious new theme from KeynotePro" text - Copy the running text object from the Sonoma Supplemental File, Paste it on the slide, edit and reposition as necessary and then click outside of the slide to deselect it. Once that's placed, you can come back to this slide at any point and Copy that text object to Paste it on a later slide in the same position.

Wait - what about the transition? We'll get to the transitions later in the process - we purposely hold off on transitions until we've got the entire presentation built. Your style may vary, but as a matter of practice we like to get our presentations built end-to-end before we dive into the slide-to-slide transition styles.

Slide #2

The second slide is very straightforward - it's the basic Title & Bullets master with a few modifications. Add a new slide, select Title & Bullets as the master, and add your text. We used this slide as a chance to show off the Accent Text effect, using the pre-formatted Accent Text object from the Supplemental file as a base and changing it to "at a Glance" (since we're going to use the lower portion of the platform frame to mask these large letters, we capitalize "Glance" so that we can run the words up against the bottom of the frame without cutting off anything that would effect readability). Select the Title & Body elements (the bullets) at the same time by control-selecting them, then slide the two upward to offset the addition of the Accent Text + re-balance the slide.

We want the text elements to come in one at a time - accent text first, then title, then the bullets once at a time - so we open the Build Inspector, and click on "Set Automatic Builds" so that the order we're building these in and how they fire is easy to edit as we go along. "At a Glance" will come up first: select the accent text, and on the Build In portion of the inspector we apply the Dissolve effect, and set the duration to 1 second. The Title is next, using the same Dissolve effect and duration as the Accent text. Bullets are last, using the same Dissolve settings - and as we now have an active Delivery selector, we set Delivery to By Bullet so that each line will appear in turn after the previous one.

If we were to stop here, the slide would rely on mouse or keyboard clicks to trigger the next build on the slide. We'd rather this all happen automatically once the slide is on the stage, though, so we'll look over to the Automatic Builds drawer. Select the first item in that list, at a Glance, and at the bottom of that drawer change the Set Automatic Build from On Click to "Automatically after transition," with a Delay setting of zero seconds. Select the next item, Title, from the list. We want this one to appear after the accent text, but without a click being required - so we set the Start Build setting to "Automatically after build 1," again with a 1 second delay. Select the next item in that list, First Body Bullet, and apply the same settings - Automatically after build 2 in this case, with a zero second delay. Make sure the Other Bullets item that rounds out that list has a Start Build setting of "Automatically after prior build" and we're ready to move on. If you're curious, take a moment to preview the slide by clicking Play - if any of your builds are not occurring automatically, or if you'd like to adjust their timings or order, just hit escape and tweak the settings on the Build Inspector until you've got everything running as you'd like.

Slide #3

The third slide builds on techniques you've covered on the first two slides: masking and builds. We wanted to illustrate the Platform concept a bit, so we'll mask out the photos, then set their build options to make them appear as needed.

On a new slide, select the "Photo - 3-up With Title & Subtitle" master. Place and mask your photos as you did back on Slide #1, and place your text. In the Quicktime demo, we start with the leftmost photograph, applying a Scale effect for Build In, direction set to Up, with a 1 second duration, set to Start Build Automatically after transition. The top-right photo is next, with the same settings save for the delay, which is set to .2 seconds after build 1. Then, we change things up on the last photo - using the Dissolve effect, set to Start Build automatically after build 2 with a zero second delay.

Once you've got the Mask and Build techniques down, it becomes a pretty quick process.

Slide #4

The fourth slide in particular seemed to draw a lot of questions - but if you've been following along with this tutorial, you can likely figure this one out on your own now if you take a moment to step through the Quicktime frame-by-frame.

Like the first slide, we want to start by placing our photos and masking them out. We have one minor difference here, as we broke things up with a solid color shape sent to the back, with the large text ampersand placed in front of that rounding out the last box. The Ampersand is placed as Helvetice Neue Bold, white, set to 288 points.

When you start working with independent shapes/text like this, you have a few more options to mix things up in terms of your builds, which is exactly what we went for in the Quicktime Demo: the shape and the ampersand have different builds, so they seem to work independently of each other to come together and make a whole. If you'd rather both of them appear at once - just group them before you apply your builds - simple as that.

So, with everything placed, we can start in on the builds. The idea on this one is to make each item cascade across the slide, culminating in the appearance of the text at the bottom of the slide. To keep everything looking like it's part of an integrated animation, we're going to use the same build type - Dissolve - for everything except the counter-movement of the ampersand. Each build is set to Start Build automatically, after transition or the previous build as needed, with a zero second delay on each. When you get to the ampersand, we change to a Pop effect for the build, which provides a nice break from the otherwise consistent motion and really gets a bit of extra attention.

And there you have it. A few simple changes, built on top of the techniques you've already covered in the first few slides - with the caveat that what makes this work so well during the Demo is that the culmination of effects on this slide make a certain conceptual sense - the cascade of each photo build coming after the other to work across the slide to build up to the text creates a very different feel than if you were to run them in a different order or all at once for that matter. That's not to say that this is the only approach to this slide: the important point to take away here is that it is just that - an approach. It is the elements working together in concert to achieve the end result that makes it powerful - not the individual techniques.

Last Two Slides + Transition Strategy.

The last two slides are really quite simple compared to the previous four. On the fifth slide, we're running a sample of the Sonoma charts. Nothing special here - we're just applying a build style to the chart itself (Flip effect, set to By Series for Delivery). And on the final slide, we're running our usual title slide reminder, with accompanying text: the slide image uses a Scale effect (Down), while the text uses Character Scale Big - set to run automatically WITH build 1. If you've been building along with us to this point, you're ready to save a "pre-transtions" version.

Now, we can start to wrap up and get into the actual slide transitions - setting them all at once at the end of the build so that we can effectively use the transitions as binding elements to really "glue" the show together and get a feel for the transitions as an integrated part of the overall presentation. We're strong proponents of this "transitions last" strategy - and though we don't use the technique in the Sonoma demo, we're equally as devoted to the "casual cues" strategy of transitioning in presentations. A "casual cues" strategy for transitions means essentially what it sounds like - it's a strategy for using the transitions between slides as cues throughout your presentation. Think of it in terms of the chapters of a book: turning a page within a chapter is different, on an essential level, than turning another page to find a whole new chapter. With this thought in mind, you can build a strategy for what type of transition you'll use on a slide, depending on the role the slide plays in relation to the surrounding slides - and though your audience may never consciously recognize it, if you apply that technique throughout your presentation, especially longer presentations, you'll find that your audience starts to have a sort of "second sense" about the presentation, and is following along with you almost effortlessly - due to the casual cues you're providing them. Granted this is a simplification of the concept and it makes no sense to explore such a strategy for something as short as this demo, but we like to leave you with a little food for thought :)

Final Thoughts

We hope this tutorial has helped you develop a few new techniques for your bag of tricks. Masking and Builds are just two of the many techniques available to you within Keynote 2 - and as with any technique you want to pace yourself: too much flash + sparkle can turn any audience from interest to overload and detract from getting your message across.

Want to test your newfound skills as a master of masks + builds? If you have our Pavilion theme installed, check out the Quicktime Demo, and pay special attention to the Circular Mosaic build. Enjoy :)