Claymation Studio 3 Deluxe animation software and camera kit

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.