Plastic Beach is an album by Gorillaz that was released on March 3rd, 2010 and the album cover shows a small island in the middle of the ocean. This island is decorated with various buildings and objects like a modern-style headquarters with palm trees at the top of the island. The bottom half is full of objects like a lighthouse on the right side and ships boarding docks. The island itself looks tense with a small base that flourishes to a wide one that rests the headquarters. The water ripples make up half the album space show the title of the album and have a squiggly shape to them. The whole environment is very warm in tone and it looks like the sun is setting. Since the album was photographed and edited in Photoshop or a similar program all the hard work had to be done beforehand which included building the set and color. There is a lot of detail that was painted on the pieces like bones or ports that are featured in figure 4. There were lots of small pieces that had to be put together and I’d imagine this took hours upon hours with a whole team. The team that worked on the set was Asylum and they’re a model-making and special effects company based in London. The director was Jamie Hewlett and they created illustrations that the Asylum team used to advance the project. To get the lonely island landscape the modeled island along with all the small attached accessories were placed in a 50,000-liter circular water tank. This must have been a long and exciting project to work on because the final image is so cool and fits the Gorillaz aesthetic. There was a lot of thought put into the 3D structures and it’s something that has impacted my idea of design and what we make of it.
