Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Music: A Junior Design Student Conceptual Project by Julia Torokhov (2017)

I am exploring the feeling of sadness through the experience of making music.

My photograph is of a small teddy bear wind chime that has fallen onto a dying red rose. The photo is meant to tell the story of a wind chime, once making music but now has fallen. The rose is dying, both because of the music and because the chime hitting is may be one of its last sounds. Using the rose to make that last note caused its death to be expedited. The rose is red because red is the color of pain, and it is also the color of love, and since the red is falling away due to the rose’s death, it also represents lost love. The bear is facing away from the camera, to indicate that it cannot look at the viewer any longer because of its failure: its inability to make any more music because it’s no longer hanging in the wind. I chose a straight on angle to make the photo feel more personal than from above, and the cloudy day time lighting gives a more sad mood to the photograph.

Overall, the photograph represents feeling sadness through the experience of making music because of the two stories told by the photo. The first being that of a wind chime becoming useless because it is unable to make any more music. The second story is of the rose dying because it caused the chime to make one of its final notes, and the final note will be once the rose dies and the wind chime hits the ground. I used Adobe Photoshop to change the chime’s bear to blue, because blue is a sad color and also to make it stand out more than a clear bear would. I desaturated the red color in its bow to take away attention from the bow, and saturated the leaves to make them pop. The red rose is also desaturated to add a dying and sickly quality to it. I added a cool blue photo filter to make the composition sadder.
Visitors 1171