Ultra Milk: "Ini Ultra" feat. Sheila On 7
Some briefs ask you to document reality. This one asked me to bend it.
Ultra Milk wanted to prove something simple but bold: that their products are Ultra, the same way certain things in Indonesia are unmistakably Ultra. Legendary. Larger than what fits into ordinary categories. And who better to carry that idea than Sheila on 7, a band whose name alone triggers a kind of collective memory for an entire generation of Indonesians.
The concept demanded exaggeration, but the kind that still felt earned. We weren't just photographing a band, we were building mythology around them, tying each member's on-stage presence to a specific benefit of Ultra Milk. Hair that moves like it belongs in a shampoo commercial. Muscles caught mid action, sharp with intensity. Bones and posture that read as strength itself. Every visual had to marry rock star energy with a commercial clarity that could survive a billboard, a print ad, an out-of-home screen glowing above a city street.
For the general key visual, I wanted the entire band suspended in a single dynamic frame, product in hand, set against a green hillside reimagined as something otherworldly. Not the golden hour anyone expects. A version of dusk that stays bright, alive, almost impossible, evoking motion and joy without tipping into darkness. That balance mattered more than people realize. Too moody and the energy dies. Too bright and it loses its edge.
The single key visuals leaned harder into concert reality. I studied footage and photographs of real live performances, chasing that specific chaos of stage lights, sweat, and unrepeatable moments, the split second a vocalist throws his head back or a guitarist leaps mid-riff. That's the emotional core we wanted borrowed, then elevated with the kind of lighting control only a studio can give you. Two worlds colliding: the raw electricity of a real show, and the polish of commercial photography that never lets clarity slip.
Hair became its own character in this story. We wanted movement dramatic enough to read as almost comedic, a wink toward shampoo advertising without losing masculinity in the process. For print, natural volume and motion did the job. For out-of-home, we pushed further, using body doubles and styled extensions to create hair large enough to physically escape the frame of a billboard, something no single photograph of a person mid-performance could safely deliver live. That kind of exaggeration only works when it's built with intention afterward, layer by layer, rather than forced onto a performer who has actual choreography to execute onstage.
What I loved about this project was the tension it lived in. Reverence for a band that means something real to people, stitched together with the heightened, slightly winking language of commercial fantasy. It's a strange kind of portrait: half tribute, half invention. But that's often where the most memorable campaign visuals live, in the space between who someone actually is and who a story needs them to become for a few unforgettable frames.
Adhitya Himawan
Co-founder and photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta.