Animation in 3DsMax

Today, after a fairly long break in 3-D Modelling, I continued learning new techniques.
For this semester, I will need to design three different animated 3-D scenes; which are for a TV channel to use as idents, and must be approximately 30 seconds long - for a TV channel of my choice.
Today we started with simple animations. I drew a sphere, which I was then to animate bouncing up and down. To make the ball(sphere) bounce up and down, firstly I clicked toggle set key mode located at the bottom of the programs main screen. This highlighted the bottom area of the screen in red indicating the timeline. Just above the timeline is a small scrollbar which indicates what frame you are currently on, to animate I simply moved the scroll bar to the fifth frame, and changed the position of the ball. I then went back to the button next to the toggle set key, and pressed the button with a picture of a key on. This indicated to the programme that the keyframe an item had moved to a new position allowing the programme to move the object for me. I repeated this step and created a simple animation in which the ball moved up and down. the next thing I tried creating was again another ball, which I was to animate using a slightly different process. The process I used, involved using the mini curve editor tool. This button can be found on the left-hand of the screen at the start of the timeline. Clicking this brings up a panel in which you can draw a curve graph, which controls the different regions of the ball. Changing the depths of these curves allows the ball to go to different areas. For example the Green line controls the y-axis of the ball. Changing the depths of this line determine whereabouts of the ball in the scene at.
Other tools in this mode allows me to add sound, as well as rotate and freeze objects. This mode is particularly useful as it can be quicker than individually setting keys.
After this I decided I would try a different shape and I created a cube. In this animation the cube multiplies into several cubes. Every 10 frames I added a new cube cloned from the cubes that already exist. These at the end merged into one cube on top of the already existing four cubes. A video of his animation I created is below: