Indomie Kuah “It’s Kuah-lity Time”

There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with photographing something everyone already knows. Indomie isn't just a product in Indonesia, it's a memory. Late nights, dorm rooms, rainy afternoons, the sound of a fork against an empty bowl. So when the brief for "Kuah-lity Time" landed, part wordplay and part genuine tribute to the ritual of sharing a meal, I understood the real subject wasn't the noodles. It was the friendship happening around them.

The campaign had already lived once as a TVC, and my job was to carry that same world into stills. Not reinterpret it from scratch, but extend it. So we rebuilt the set inside Ruang HIRA, matching the TVC's living room down to its bones: the warm wood tones, the mismatched throw pillows, the shelves cluttered just enough to feel lived in rather than styled. Working from someone else's production design is its own discipline. You're not inventing a world, you're inhabiting one faithfully enough that the transition between moving image and photograph feels seamless.

Lighting became the real negotiation. The TVC had a mood I wanted to protect, moody, a little cinematic, warm in a way that felt like early evening indoors. But photographs don't move, they sit still and get studied, so we had to brighten that same mood without losing its soul. We pulled the color palette almost directly from the TVC's earthy tones, then adjusted them carefully so they'd hold up in print rather than shift muddy or overly warm. The client had clear instructions here too: keep the shadows from swallowing detail, avoid tipping the whole image too yellow. Small calibrations, but they're the difference between a photograph that feels intentional and one that feels like a screenshot.

What mattered most, though, was what happened in front of the lens. This campaign lived or died on whether the laughter looked real. I wanted expressions caught in that in-between moment, not posed enjoyment but the kind of unguarded reaction that happens when a bowl of noodles is genuinely good and the company is even better. Eyes closed mid-bite. A shoulder leaning into someone else's. The instinctive tilt of a head laughing at something just said. We composed each frame to hold that balance between the product clearly present in someone's hand and the human moment surrounding it, never letting the packaging upstage the intimacy.

By the time we wrapped, the set at Ruang HIRA had become, briefly, someone's living room. Not a studio dressed to look like one, but a space that held real warmth for the hours we worked inside it. That's the quiet trick of set-based production done right. You're not faking a memory. You're building a room honest enough that people recognize themselves in it, one shared bowl at a time.

Adhitya Himawan
Co-founder and photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.