Pokémon x JKT48

There's a version of this job that relies on instinct. You walk in, you read the room, you adjust. I love that version. This was not that version.

When the client brief arrives from Japan, precise and complete, with a clear picture of exactly what the final image needs to look like. That's a different kind of discipline. Not looser. Tighter. Because the margin for on-set discovery is essentially zero, the creative work has to happen somewhere else, earlier, when there's still time to think.

Three key visuals. One with three members. Two with twelve members each. JKT48, a group I've photographed enough times now that there's genuine shorthand between us. But even that familiarity doesn't solve the geometry of placing that many people in a frame and making every single one of them matter.

So I planned it like an engineer.

Set.A.Light, a 3D lighting simulation tool, became the pre-production studio. I built the sets virtually, placed the talent based on member data, and worked out camera height, lens choice, and light positions before a single case was unpacked. The simulation told me where to stand. On the day itself, I moved the camera by a few centimetres. That was the adjustment. Centimetres.

That's not luck. That's what preparation looks like when the brief is airtight and the stakes are real.

There's a particular satisfaction in a shoot that runs exactly as designed. Not because spontaneity isn't valuable (it is, enormously) but because executing a complex vision with surgical accuracy is its own form of craft. The chaos is managed offsite. What's left on set is clarity.

Pokémon and JKT48 is, on paper, an unlikely pairing that somehow makes complete sense. The energy in both fandoms is the same: devoted, joyful, and absolutely certain that their world is the best one. Photographing that collision, twelve members radiating genuine excitement alongside characters that have meant something to people for thirty years, is the kind of work that reminds you why advertising can still be fun.

I'd do it many times over.

- Arza Nursatya, advertising photographer. HIRA Imaji, Jakarta