To help us develop our own digipack, I wanted to research two different album covers from Florence + the machine to see how she keeps the same design, themes and structure of her album covers to reflect her songs and the moods that they contain. We do not want to copy her design, but we want our album cover to portray the same genre and mood that her creative have created.Dog Days Are Over Single Cover (2008)
The designer has placed the action inside a circle with a black background. (I have done sketches and designs of our album cover uses shapes such as the circle but in my opinion it wasn't effective so instead we are using a square to place our action inside.) He has done this to show the contrast with the dullness of the black background and how earthy colours mixed with primary colours such as red and yellow stand out to the consumer. The setting in the foreground is also used in the music video and has used props from the video such as the bird cage and the different range of flowers to demonstrate how this song and music video represents the indie genre. Like our music video, the single cover uses the forest draped with leaves and logs and in the background there is some coloured flags to indicate how it links to the music video. In my opinion, the artist has thought carefully on images that will make the reader buy the single/album. For me the animals highlighted in white stand out because they are presented as animals that live in the forest and maybe the artist used the colour white to highlight them because they are animals who could disguise themselves in the background. In addition, this album cover represents the emotions and feelings from this song and it demonstrates another example of how Florence is categorised from the indie pop genre.
The original music video:
In the video, Florence is lying in a forest, when a person in a white dress comes over and blindfolds her, and leads her to a clearing, filled with eerie-looking carnival/clown dressed people. (The designer has incorporated the circus flags in the background of the album cover to link to the context of the video.) Florence stands blindfolded for a few seconds, then takes the blindfold off and runs from a different range of people. She eventually trips, and lays there as the carnival/clown people dress her like them. When they filmed this video, they only used one camera and they used Florence's relatives to play the roles of the circus people instead of hiring extras because it is cheaper.
Dog Days Are Over Single Cover (2010)This cover was used to promote the re-release of the song with a new music video which was released in April 2010. This cover and the Lungs album cover both use a white border outline around the outside of of the main action and it works well with the black background that is a constant colour throughout the albums of Florence and the machine. Also the white writing at the top of the cover in bold/italic style shows how it is a permanent image/brand for the consumers to recognise the artist/band. (We want to make our own style of writing for our album cover producing the writing inside the booklet and we want to keep the same writing style/font throughout. But we are using this as an example to make ours appealing to our target audience.) In addition, she has used a block style of writing at the bottom of the cover to promote the name of the song. In comparison, this cover produces more brightness with the white background highlighting florence in her indie costume. This cover is plain comapred to the first album cover which has a lot going on. This one is very effeective, because again it links to the video and the style of it. The costume sticks out to the be the first thing people see when buying it or downloading it. (In ours we are going to highlight our costume in the foreground of the album cover.) In conclusion, this cover links to the genre of indie pop and art rock and focuses mainly on the singer and these two different album covers, represent different meanings but from the same song.
The Music Video:
- In this video, Florence is dancing in a white-washed room.
- This video also contains go-go dancers, drummers wearing tribal outfits, harpists, marching band timpanists and a gospel choir wearing white and purple.
- The video ends with Florence standing alone in the room. Throughout the video she wears full-body white make-up with intricate clothing and vivid red eye-liner and blusher.
