Thanks for your help Rodrigo, I was a little lost as to how best to tackle this, but your reply certainly helped me look at it in a different way
I needed the background transparency animation from my original pen though, and after a bit of messing about, it became obvious that I really needed to separate the change in height from the background transparency so I could involve some kind of scrub on the height change, otherwise it felt a bit jerky.
I think i've achieved this now but i'm not sure how well its constructed, but it seems to work at least!
See the Pen XWyjXOq by darkgr33n (@darkgr33n) on CodePen