Telkomsel Mega Project - Image Bank
Some projects announce their scale immediately. This one had a name before it had a schedule: the Telkomsel Mega Project. It earned that name.
The brief was an image bank. A structured library of visuals covering nine different Telkomsel sub-brands. Same poses, different wardrobes, different talents, repeated across each brand until the client had thousands of usable frames deployable across every media channel for the better part of a year. That's the logic of it, and it's genuinely sound logic.
Shoot once, deeply, and the resulting asset library works harder and longer than any single campaign image ever could. As a photographer, you learn to respect that kind of thinking even when it's pushing you well past the point of comfort.
Preparation alone was extensive. Casting was meticulous. The right look, clean competitive history, schedules that could actually be aligned across an undertaking this size. Then came workshops, prelights, the invisible architecture of a production that, by the time it starts rolling, has to function like a machine.
Nine shoot days, compressed into a single month. Most of them started at dawn and didn't end until the city had gone quiet again. That's not photography anymore, that's endurance sport. What kept the team functional, genuinely, was humour. The jokes between setups, the absurdity of still being on set in the dead of night, the shared awareness that everyone around you was equally spent and equally committed. That's the only currency that circulates at that hour.
When the ninth day finally closed, the set went quiet in a way that felt different from any other wrap. Nobody rushed. We sat with it for a moment. The exhaustion, the relief, the strange pride of having actually finished something that big. Then we had breakfast together, half-present, half-somewhere else entirely, laughing at nothing in particular.
That breakfast might be the most honest image from the whole project.
- Arza Nursatya, advertising photographer. HIRA Imaji, Jakarta