Animation creation and management in presentation application programs

An animation timeline is analyzed to determine one or more discrete states. Each discrete state includes one or more animation effects. The discrete states represent scenes of a slide in a slide presentation. The concepts of scenes allows user to view a timeline of scenes, open a scene, and direct manipulate objects in the scene to author animations. The animations can include motion path animation effects, which can be directly manipulated utilizing a motion path tweening method. To aid in direct manipulation of a motion path of an object, a ghost version of the object can be shown to communicate to a user the position of the object after a motion path animation effect that includes the motion path is performed. The ghost version may also be used to show a start position when a start point is manipulated.