Keynote Comes of Age

We never expected we would be posting about keynote here on fxguide.com but one of the surprising things at the Autodesk User group was the amazingly cool graphic design presentation that the team used. Normally we would run a mile than sit through a Powerpoint presentation but with the new Keynote 2, the product has turned into a serious tool for designers.

Of course, without great graphic design at its root, we probably wouldn’t have covered Keynote here. The stunning presentation ran continuously for almost two hours moving from product to product, screen insert to message points as if one continuous animation. The presentation was designed by Alex Olegnowic and the team @ Imarion with implementation by Autodesk Japan’s Hiroyuki Toba.

Click through for a QuickTime movie and interview with the team.

View a QuickTime of a sample from the presentation.

On the day the presentation ran seamlessly. You may think this is an odd thing for us to post on, but it really was an eye opener, this looked more like a show opener than a powerpoint. The process of designing the graphics was relatively simple, says Olegnowicz, ” I called my creative director Ervan Cunanan, and I sat down with him at our Smoke suite. As we had 2009 loaded I was able to show him 2 basic things: 1) How the timeline works in Smoke, 2) Some basics of Batch and Action, what the workflow looks like, how we move layers around and how the nodes look like.”

After this short session, the team had to shoot the hand here in their office. They used a Sony F900R and shot the hand on a black background.

Cunanan took the Autodesk design and built from that, as Autodesk didn’t mind if they changed the overall look of the nodes and timeline. “Marc Hammaker was great at giving us all the freedom to come up with any design, the only parameter was that we show integration between the product line and he gave us the words that appear on the piece,” explains Olegnowicz. Ervan designed all the elements in Illustrator and photoshop and combined all of them in AE to create the opening for both the users group and the NAB booth. The finals were delivered as an HD sequence, plus all the independent elements.

Toba-san used all the elements and created the workflow graphs that were shown using keynote. “I took some of his implementation and created my own presentation for the booth” says Olegnowicz. “I find Keynote to be an incredible tool. The animation inspector is very powerful, it gives the user a lot of options on how to animate virtually anything. It is a very simple “After effectsy” tool. You get to do moves, scaling and rotation without a lot of effort and the transitions are very well implemented, as long as you stay away from the cheesy ones. It is quite easy to use.”

One of the aspects that made the piece work was the sense of a huge virtual workspace – and this was helped by the seamless horizontal or vertical transitions that keynote allowed. From a viewers point of view the piece played like one seamless huge screen without seams, edges, transitions or apparent ‘page’ changes. “I had no previous experience using the animation tools on Keynote and have been using it for a month or so with very spectacular results. The only drawback is that there is no timeline so timing is a bit flimsy, but it works. For presentation software, it’s at the top of my list.” he said adding with a smile but it’s “Toba-san who is a master on Keynote”.