Simple shape morphing in Keynote...?

Hello,
I am seeking help with what should be a simple task (I reckon), but which is turning out not to be...
I use Keynote 9 for my teaching presentations. I need to show semi-transparent coloured regions – superimposed onto maps – that change through time, and I would like to make that change into a fluid animation: simple semi-transparent blobs that change shape. That's all! Simple, huh.
Here are the problems...
- The shapes are irregular (so Magic Move won't do it)
- Keynote 9, so no Flash
- I can get Adobe Illustrator to generate Flash animations and then I should be able to convert them with VideoMonkey into .mp4s... except that VideoMonkey utterly refuses to convert the .swf files generated by Illustrator...  No idea what's going on there... Tried everything I can think of, no go.
- Downloaded a trial version of Mac SWF Video Converter, but this seems to make mp4s with black backgrounds...  I couldn't see any way to maintain the transparency (and of course Instant Alpha doesn't work on video files)
- I can generate single animation frames in Adobe Illustrator then use Preview to combine them into animated GIFs, but Keynote will not import the result with a transparent background (yes, I can *make* them with a transparent background, but Keynote renders it solid white on import...)
- I can convert the animated GIF to a QT movie (using GIF2MOV), but then I lose the semi-transparency on the shapes themselves.
- I could place each of my Illustrator-generated animation frames onto a separate Keynote slide and have them auto Transition with no Effect – so use Keynote itself as the animation software – but for a halfway decent smoothness in the animation, we're talking a lot of frames and this approach seems pretty inefficient to me...  Not to mention a pain to do (as the image on each slide has to be independently aligned...  take me for ever!)
For a relatively simple visual effect, this appears to be implausibly difficult to do...    Unless someone out there can see another way of doing it...
Many thanks for any suggestions.

Interesting idea...  I managed to achieve the effect I was after (I'll explain how below) only to realize that what I was actually aiming for was even harder than I had realized...
What I am trying to animate is changing ethnic "territories" over time in South East Asia. These are complicated little shapes that merge into one another and shift about all over the place. As I am dealing with historical territorial (or perhaps more accurately, "distributional") data, I project it onto a purely physical map of Asia that has no modern political boundaries (as they are irrelevant). But this also means (if you are not so good at geography) that your normal visual reference points have gone, and for my students (French university-level language students, not geography majors) I'm sure that the result can be a little difficult to assimilate.
For the past few years, I have been happily fading different, often visually disjunct arrangements into one another, but I have always been only moderately satisfied with the result: the changes can be hard to track visually, which defeats the whole purpose of displaying them this way...  I wanted the shapes to flow without interruption (like blobs of wax in a Lava lamp! - Theres an image for you!) – to be visually coherent.
I began therefore thinking about morphing, and Flash animations...
...and ran into all the problems that the tiff between Apple and Adobe has currently left us with. (Don't you like the play on words there... tiff... )
I gave up on trying to animate just the transparent blobs, with a view to overlaying the animation on a static blank map in Keynote, and instead tried animating the whole lot, background map and all, using Adobe Illustrator. The process involves Illustrator's blend tool, and exporting to .swf, then recapturing the .swf files with Snapz Pro X in .mov format, which allowed Keynote to import them.
BUT! The result was still not what I wanted (picky, eh). Illustrator's blend tool does a superb job of translating any form into any other, no matter how complex, but groups of humans moving over land don't move like that! For instance, a circluar region moving to a coastal region, when "morphed" will progressively adopt the shape of the coastline before reaching it, which is just silly. It looks as if the population being represented distribute themselves to neatly match the coast when still about 500kms away (and over the space of several generations). Call me stickler, but it doesn't look right. It isn't right, and it's not what I need...
Sure, any such representation is a vast oversimplification in any case, but superimposing such a specifically impossible visual trait onto the presentation runs counter to the whole idea of doing it for me. It should be iconically plausible (even if not accurate).
So... I'm in a pause...  Looking to understand animating shapes better...
I like your screen shot idea tho'. I will have to try it out...
Cheers,
Colin

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