Did you ever make little claymation movies? My brother did. I remember one he made, just a tube of clay inching its way along the table, like a friend of Gumby’s. “The Worm” was shot with a new Super-8 camera my folks had given him and a production budget of about seven cents for the clay. From those humble beginnings, my brother made a career in the movie business — driving his own camera truck and doing keygrip work (and complaining about chucklehead Hollywood “types” and which stars have souls and which ones are jerks, but that’s another story).

And since I’m always pondering my next career move, here’s a cool software program I’d like to try: Claymation Studio from honestech.

The idea with Claymation Studio is that you create the images, then capture them into the software using a digital camera, webcam or DV camcorder. Then you apply small changes, add background images and music and there you have it: You could become known as the next Walt Disney.

What do you need the software for? An onionskin feature lets you view the previous frame in transparent overlay to help you create the next frame or image. A rotoscope feature lets you take one image and overlay another image to create a third image. Finally, a chroma key (that blue screen you see behind weather people on TV) lets you change the background so that it looks like your character is standing on your desktop, for example.

The program runs on Windows XP or Vista and doesn’t require any majorly intensive processing power, but the manual does suggest you defragment your hard disk before installation — a suggestion I’ve never seen in documentation before.

Who knows where it could lead? I hear Pixar is hiring animators. And as we all know, the actor who played Mater definitely has a soul. I hear he gave everybody on the shoot these really great Car crew jackets.