Hi,
I just started learning to use blender a few weeks back and decided to incorporate blender’s animation capabilities to my university assignment. I’m supposed to design a crane to pick up containers from a ship. The problem is that I really can’t get my head around how to animate the cable to reel out and in again and in the process grabbing a container. It would even suffice if the cable was to be streched so that it would look like that it was reeling out. Apologies if this question is answered with a technique showed in one of this site’s tutorials, but I just weren’t able to find one. 
I’ve added two fotos illustrating the case. I’ve tried resizing the cable seen in the picture, but I don’t know how to set the pivot point to the lift it is connected to and merely stretching it and saving the size and location just won’t work in the animation. Thanks in advance!
