"Rigging" objects for motion graphic

[Mokiki]

Disclaimer:
I am completely oblivious to 3ds max rigging tools or anything besides basic object linking/parenting.

Now with this out of the way I currently have to work on an animation where I need to animate some sort of hallway looking like this: http://www.icehotel.com/wp-content/u...n-1140x761.jpg

So basically I have an array of objects that I need to be able to easily affect their position and rotation (+rotation offset), so I can get an effect like the walls in the picture without deformation the objects.
Since this will be a pretty long hallway I want to avoid touching every object manually. So my goal would be to probably have some helper objects to affect the position/rotation/scale/falloff for the various parts of said hallway. (eg. Start/middle/end)

I can get the basic effect with a clone modifier but since I have to affect not only copies this sadly falls flat. I also thought about railclone but I am not 100% sure if I have to hand this off to someone else who doesn't have railclone at some point depending on an upcoming project. :/

Does anybody have an idea on how to achieve what I want? Or could point me in the right direction?

P.S I hope the way I described this isn't too confusing. :P

[oophus]

Just use bones, and skin?
1 bone for every wall segment which is then 100% skinned to that bone.

Then you have all the opportunity to use normal rigging systems to control these.

[AlexP]

Would be super easy with Railclone I think

Otherwise you can animate all the segments rotating, and then offset the frames down the hallway. There are scripts for doing that so you dont need to manual it, Im sure there are other ways of easily offsetting.
Maybe even animated proxy

[Mokiki]

@AlexP
Yup it would be easy to do some basic rail clone system with incremental rotations and scale but as soon as things would become none linear I think would get complicated real fast. Maybe I'll just do it and see if I can get away with it.

@oophus
Like I said I have no real rigging experience only ever did some basic parenting so I never used bone and skin. Guess now is good a time as any to find some tutorials on it. Thanks for the suggestion.