Bouncing rubber ball / Key frame animation.

Animating the ball, a fairly simple animation, using Keyframes (Set with the S key on the timeline)

First off, we have the display for the frames, numbers one to 31. For starters, I'll fully animate frames 1 till 7, then I'll animate frames 12,17,21, etc (Basically all the balls that aren't grey)

As you can see, rotating and stretching the ball to fit frames 5 and 6, to give that sense of speed and velocity. Only to be squashed. Now putting all the black ball frames in place,I'll run the animation, and... The ball doesn't exactly morph as projected. This is because the animated ball is trying to transition to frame 12, calculating frames 8 to 11 from the 7 start, to the 12 end.

But to get the animation to work properly, we'll need to fill out all the grey frames in order to get the animation to work out as intended.

Now in the actual animation, I've actually key frame animated a few things in question, for example the Star destroyer was using keyframes as this allowed more accuracy in movement than motion paths. Although it's more tedious with alot more input required.

But it allows for more sudden actions that tween from one key frame to another.