Designer and developer Linda Dong created this amusing and surprisingly sprightly motion graphic entirely within Apple’s Keynote presentation software. She says:

I’ve always been a huge advocate of using Keynote for basic prototyping because there are a lot of great animation/drawing goodies hidden in this app and it’s so easy to set a scene up. Same thing goes with motion graphics. Even if you’re not planning on making your final animation in Keynote, it’s an incredibly fast way to audition different effects and narratives.

Like Dong, I’m a longtime fan of Keynote, both for prototyping as she mentions as well as for its ostensibly primary purpose: creating presentation decks. That she can produce such a quality result from its relatively basic animation tools is both surprising and not surprising to me. Keynote has long confounded me as following more or less zero patterns for the way software should work. I’m not talking about its usability, which has generally been good if not perfect. Rather, I’m talking about its place in the world: it started out life as a tool for Steve Jobs exclusively, and now it’s meant for everyone—though only design and technology professionals really use it; it’s got tremendous power under the hood (as these animations prove), and yet it doesn’t really provide users an interface to harness that power easily; it’s been sold at retail prices, and it’s now mostly free… by rights this kind of software shouldn’t exist.

In any event, Dong has more details on her experiment as well as tips for animating with Keynote at lindadong.com.