​CRYSTALYNE WILLIS​

Crystalyne Willis loves telling stories full of heart and eye candy.

 

She thoroughly enjoys working as a set dresser & props buyer for film & tv, where she thrives on adding character and back story through the details of objects and space.  

 

Her ability to find connections between objects and character is the driving force to her passion as a stop-motion animation film maker.  By using assemblage puppets, Crystalyne focuses on what the objects reveal about the character and its underlining story.

 

Her theatre practice lies in performance design, which is an integration of the design as part of the performance.  An example is in her work for Pacific Blood, where sand was laid out to look like lines of longitude & latitude.  As the story progressed, the lines were disheveled from the actors' movements  paralelling the decline of Captain Cook's health, ideologies, & command of his crew. 

 

Crystalyne is a Mayan Kiwi; born in Wellington, New Zealand with Guatemalan heritage.  She loves living internationally, having lived in New Zealand, Mexico, Venezuala, Japan, USA, Czech Republic, UK, Malaysia, and now Australia.  She studied Performance Design for Stage & Screen in Wellington at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School as well as Scriptwriting (minoring in Animation) at FAMU in Prague.  She has recently completed Be-Friended, a live action puppetry film, which has won film festival awards for Best Children's Short Film at Tamizhagam International Film Festival India and Best Animated Film at Arts Film Awards Skopje.  Her stop-motion animation Anything But Eggs, received a grant from the Wellington Emerging Arts Trust.