Tata Steel Returns To We Also Make Tomorrow With Recycle Of Life
Recycle of Life is the second phase of Tata Steel's We Also Make Tomorrow platform, which first ran in 2018. The film is animated by Martyn Pick using a bespoke technique the team calls Painting into Pixels, and scored with an original composition.
- Brand: Tata Steel
- Platform: hashtag We Also Make Tomorrow, first phase 2018
- Film: Recycle of Life
- Animator: Martyn Pick
- Technique: Painting into Pixels, developed for the film
- Music: Recycle Raga, composed by Dhruv Ghanekar
- Vocals: Carnatic vocalist Sanjay Subrahmanyan
- Central device: children, standing for future generations
Why Recycle Of Life Is Hand-Painted
Because steel is the last thing an audience expects to see rendered in paint. A category that defaults to drone shots of plants, molten pours and men in hard hats has a visual language so fixed that any film using it disappears into the last one.
Martyn Pick's technique puts brushwork on screen, which does something a photographed film cannot: it makes the material look made rather than mined. For an argument about recycling, where the point is that the same steel returns in another form, a medium that visibly reworks its own surface is doing thematic work, not decoration.
The Music Is Not Background
Recycle Raga, composed by Dhruv Ghanekar and sung by Sanjay Subrahmanyan, is a deliberate choice of form. A raga is built on returning to a phrase and finding it altered, which is the same shape as the film's argument. Putting a leading Carnatic vocalist on a steel company's film is also a statement about who the brand thinks it is addressing.
It is a risk. Classical vocal in a corporate film can read as prestige for its own sake, and the scoring has to earn the choice rather than announce it.
What Eight Years Buys A Platform
We Also Make Tomorrow launched in 2018, and returning to it now rather than launching something new is the decision worth marking. Indian corporate marketing abandons platforms fast, usually within two leadership changes, and the result is a series of well-made films that add up to nothing.
A second phase is a bet that the first one is still in the audience's memory. The film is on Tata Steel's YouTube channel. More campaigns.
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