Crazy Talk Animator Standard

Crazy Talk Animator is the successor of Crazy Talk 6, which allowed users to take a static picture of a face and animate it so the lips moved in time with speech.

The latest version adds full body animation to produce characters that walk, talk and dance with convincing, realistic movements and expressions. You also get full control over background scenes and props, including the ability to bring in your own photos. While Crazy Talk 6 was fun, this is a a much more serious product – though it's still tremendously fun.

The main screen provides a central working area to create scenes and add characters, along with a set of buttons at the top that step through the animation process – adding actors, animating them, placing them in a scene, using special effects and then exporting the results in popular video formats such as WMV, AVI and MPG4.

A window on the right is used to pick from the library of characters, scenes, props and effects, and specific animation tools that control how characters behave.

As well as using the range of included actors and props you can add your own from photos you have taken or scanned in from magazines and catalogues. The results were surprisingly effective but the process was long-winded.

We found it necessary to take care to remove any parts of the original image that should not be included. It also took time to fine-tune the way that photographs of faces morph to smile, laugh and talk realistically.

Besides the Standard version reviewed, the Pro version, priced at £140, adds more timeline and puppeteering features.

Crazy Talk only works in two dimensions but thanks to its ability to position props and characters in front of or behind each other to create depth and perspective, that's barely a limitation. We found it easy to make characters interact with each other and their environment – for example, picking something up, walking across the room and then putting it down again.

Mastering all Crazy Talk's tools will take time but if you are interested in animation, it's worth it. Beginners will find the learning curve gentle enough to encourage them to keep going.