Chris Ullens' 'The KiLL 2': a doll stop-motion music video shot in two weeks with out-of-frame rigging only

Director and stop-motion animator Chris Ullens made the music video for Lex Amanri's 'The KiLL 2' with production company Marvellous Last Night, and Dragonframe's showcase blog profiled the shoot on 31 August 2026. The story came from Sully, a creative director at the artist's music label, who wrote it and sent it to Ullens with the track: two friends whose night of endless scrolling tips into a gory, comic killing spree against influencers, played out entirely by Barbie-like fashion dolls. The finished video, posted to Ullens' Vimeo account, runs about two and three-quarter minutes and is described there as a multi-technique stop-motion music video.

The schedule was the whole design brief: roughly a month, on a tight budget, for about two and a half minutes of stop motion. Ullens worked from a rough animatic made before anything was built, so the edit at the end took a single day. Executive producer Max Alan's team at Marvellous Last Night built the sets and props, and director of photography Jamie Durand, Ullens' collaborator of some twenty years, soldered the practical lights. About a week and a half later the crew went into a windowless studio for a two-week shoot during the UK heatwave, under warm tungsten light. Post was one day each: sound design and mix with Adam Hare at String and Tins, then the grade with colourist Jack McGinity at Studio RM. The video was released the next day, three working days after the shoot wrapped. The credits also list art director Maureen Kargbo, miniature and prop maker Kiara Gourlay, a projector-capture team (Ullens, Durand and Bowen Moreno, with projectionist Simon King) and VFX by Idan Ashkenazi.

The most reusable lesson is about rigging. With no time for intricate rigs or for removing them afterwards, the team used only out-of-frame rigging and avoided walking shots and complicated moves, which is why so much of the action happens on a bed or with the dolls seated. Ullens says that hard limits are where stop motion makes you more creative. SMDB's Wiki page on rig removal now uses the video as a worked example of designing shots so that there is nothing to remove.