animation - deformers

R.E. Deformers.
Think i've figured it out. Turns out i was just being paranoid. Tried the same process with a shrink deformer on the same object and managed to exercise an element of control. I've not got it on demand yet, and not tried it on a curve deformer, but it's still early days. All i did was rotate it in the graph editor like i would a normal object. Think what i was doing wrong before was attempting to grab the right handle using the rotate tool in the view port. Need to learn which axis corresponds to which direction.