I’m always inspired when things are used in ways they’re not ‘supposed’ to be. Or when people find ways to achieve their goals with very unconventional tools, so I am loving Martin Gee’s animations with Apple Keynote.

The trick is to use the ‘Magic Move’ functionality in Keynote, to animate the changed position of objects between frames. Basically: Create a square on one frame, duplicate the frame, move the square and change its colour, and ask Magic Move to fill in the gaps. With enough planning and patience, you can end up with things like this:

And with even more talent, time, and skill, things like this 🤩:

Where Martin really blows my mind though is with the creation of animations like this one of BB8, with only the ability to move the position and colour of 2D shapes, not to rotate them through 3D planes 🤯 :

How this is achieve is close to magic, or at least, what I would classify as pure ingenuity and creativity 👏:

Taking a (boring) tool or platform for one thing and figuring out how to make it do something (ingeniously) different. It’s a practice that allows a creative to focus more on what they’re trying to achieve, rather than just following the default patterns laid out in a dedicated tool.

Yes, there are still very firm boundaries within any platform, but the act of pushing and breaking them is an important part of the creative act. It forces the questions ‘What am I trying to do? What can I do? How can I make something happen?’. Questions that seemingly easier platforms encourage us to forget to ask.

I’ve collected a number of examples like this over the years, and shared a few with students a little while back in a brief that asked them to ‘push the platform’.

It was fun to challenge them with the inputs and opportunity before showing how others had been creative in response to those restrictions. Let’s do the same here, and see how you get on.

Question 1: What if you wanted to make music but only had access to Microsoft Excel?

Question 2: How might we create a cartoon with a record player?

Question 3: Is there a connection between landscape photography and a hotdog?

Have a think. Answers below. Unless you’ve seen the links before, I wager you won’t believe what you see, but that you’ll love it. And possibly, that you’ll feel your own neural pathways creatively sparking into place.

Answer 1
Answer 2
Answer 3

Update, 12 June 2024: Notable mention to using Excel in unusual and amazing ways: 77-Year-Old Man “Paints” Beautiful Japanese Landscapes on Excel Spreadsheets