Jolyon Watkins

An eye for automotive beauty, an innate understanding of action storytelling and a gift for intuitive casting and natural talent direction are the hallmarks of Jolyon Watkins director’s showreel.

Growing up on his Father’s car dealership with a love of movies and motorsport it seems only natural that Jolyon would gravitate to the automotive advertising for his directing career.

Graduating from the pre-eminate Victorian College of the Arts Film and Television School, Jolyon initially gravitated towards music videos, which earned him awards and nominations both in Australia and overseas. His established formula in his music videos was weighted towards character based storytelling, and that has translated seamlessly into his dialogue driven commercials, in combination with slick and stylish images.

In directing the worldwide hit music video ADDICTED TO BASS, an action homage to the cult car film MAD MAX, Jolyon kickstarted his automotive advertising career.

What followed is with a long string of successful advertising campaigns for all of the major manufacturers.

His various action commercials for JEEP (Clemenger BBDO), HONDA (Draft FCB), MAZDA (CHE), MITSUBISHI (Clemenger BBDO) and SUZUKI (MJW) are a sublime hybrid of stunning car photography, exhilarating tracking and aerial footage, wrapped together with compelling performances and slick, seamless edits.

From the race track to the studio, Jolyon’s slick and stylish photographic studies for HYUNDAI (Innocean) BMW (Badjar), NISSAN and FORD (JWT) have shown that he has an innate eye for automotive beauty on the turntable as well.

Most recently Jolyon’s been busy combining all disciplines in his lifestyle and running footage commercials for GM HOLDEN (AJF Partnership).

These unique campaigns interweave stunning car photography with intimate character studies of their owners.