I was working on something else and came across this question. I'm doing something similar and using greensock. I animated the scale on a couple circles using Greensock, GSAP. I needed to animate tranformOrigin and the scale property:
TweenMax.staggerFrom(".circle",1,{scale:0,transformOrigin:"50% 50%",ease:Bounce.easeOut}, .08);
Example https://codepen.io/grmdgs/pen/RgjdPv
Greensock https://greensock.com/