Current research efforts focus on providing interactive techniques that make 3D concepts easy to use and accessible to large numbers of people. In this paper, a new interactive technique for animating deformable objects is presented. The technique allows easy specification and control of a class of deformations that cannot be produced by existing techniques without considerable human intervention.The methodology proposed relies on the Free-Form Deformation (FFD) technique. It makes use of a deformation tool that is animated like any other object.This approach provides a representation of the deformations independent of the surface geometry, and can be easily integrated into traditional hierarchical animation systems.