vivo Y400

Seven layouts. One day. The math alone should have been enough to walk away, but that's not how this works.

When vivo came to us for the Y400 launch campaign, the brief was ambitious by any measure. The range of visual concepts was wide. Moody product keys, lifestyle shots, an underwater sequence and each demanded a completely different approach to lighting, staging, and execution. Trying to chase all of that across multiple locations would have meant hauling a studio's worth of equipment somewhere we didn't fully control, then praying the light held and the logistics didn't collapse. I've been down that road before. It's rarely worth it.

So we kept everything in-house. Studio. Full control. That decision sounds conservative on paper, but in practice it freed us to be genuinely aggressive with the work.

The two concepts that worried me most from the start were the twilight purple key, where the phone needed to feel like it was rising from water at golden hour and the underwater talent shot. Where a Y400 is held beneath the surface while a model swims above. Executing the underwater sequence practically, on location, would have required a facility we simply didn't have time to secure and prep for a one-day turnaround. So the answer was composite work, built with AI generation as part of the pipeline.

Here's the honest truth about that decision: around mid-2025, AI image generation was still inconsistent enough that going that route carried real risk. There was a genuine fifty-fifty chance the underwater environment would read as artificial in the worst way. Flat, uncanny, unconvincing. The kind of result that makes a client call at midnight.

What made it work was the collaboration. Steven Joe from HIRA Studio brought the technical rigour to the compositing process, and together we pushed the renders until the water moved right, until the light refracted believably, until the hands holding the phone felt grounded in a real physical space. It took iteration and it took stubbornness. But it held.

The rest of the campaign: the jungle green sitting quiet and textured against tropical foliage, the levitating product flat lay, the coffee-spill splash frame that required its own careful physical staging, each had its own problem to solve. What tied them together was the same principle: treat the studio not as a fallback, but as the most powerful location available.

Seven layouts. One day. It came together because we refused to let the complexity become an excuse.

Arza Nursatya

Advertising Photographer of HIRA Imaji, Jakarta