Simple clear advice in plain English

Claymation Studio 3 Deluxe animation software and camera kit

Make your own Wallace and Gromit-style movies with this software

Claymation Studio 3 Deluxe

The software was straightforward to install and use

Claymation Studio includes everything you need to make stop-motion movies in the style of the Oscar-winning animator Aardman Animations, which made Morph and Wallace and Gromit.

The kit contains the animation software and a neat little USB webcam for taking the pictures, which means all you need to provide is an idea for a story along with the characters that you can photograph, move a fraction, then photograph again, in order to simulate movement. See our guide to stop-motion animation.

Although it looks like a gimmick at first – mainly because it's the spitting image of Sony's AIBO robot dog – the camera's extremely useful.

It has a built-in microphone and because the legs and head are articulated, you can position it in many different ways to get the camera angle just right – on flat or uneven surfaces, clinging to a monitor, sitting on a narrow ledge and so on.

You can use your own webcam but not a still camera – the camera must be recognised by Windows as a ‘video source'.

The software was straightforward to install and use. It detected the camera and showed a real time view in a large preview window.

Captured shots appear as individual frames along the bottom on a simple timeline. You can capture a single shot by clicking the mouse, pressing the spacebar or by using Autocapture which can be set to regularly record a frame (you can choose the time in-between shots, from one second to 10 hours.

The latter means the kit can also be used for time lapse photography – such as filming a sunrise or a flower opening in the sun).

You can add background music, a voice-over (narration or frame-by-frame dialogue) simple titles, and for more exotic storylines, use the chromakey feature for shooting against a green backdrop, then dropping your characters in over the background of your choice.

Finished movies can be exported to Youtube and Facebook as well as the usual video formats.

Claymation Studio 3 Deluxe is genuinely fun to use, easy to get to grips with and produced good results.

Read more reviews

Reader Comments

display:none  

Add your comment

All fields must be completed. Your email address will not be displayed or used to send marketing messages.

All messages will be checked by moderators before appearing on the site.

See our Privacy Policy for more information.

Our verdict

img

Excellent, easy to use all-in-one stop-motion software that budding animators will love

Good points

Easy to use; flexible camera; exports to popular services; includes chromakey for special effects; wide range of capture settings

Bad points

Froze a couple of times when importing files

Best price on the web

Manufacturer

Honest Technology

Phone 0151 2346 3700

Latest issue & subscription deals

No matching document

Poll

Are you concerned about viruses that target mobile phones?

Jargon Buster

Computing terms explained in plain English

CAD

Computer Aided Design. Software used to create 3D models.

Great shopping deals from Computeractive