Makeda Yezalaleul

My name is Makeda Yezalaleul and I am in Digital Media at Freestyle Academy.

Some interesting facts about me include that my parents are both from Ethiopia, so I visit every other summer and stay with my grandparents.

I fell in love with poetry in the eighth grade when I was asked to write a poem about where I’m from. During freshman year, poetry was reintroduced to me in the form of a unit in my English class. There, I was able to explore the methods of poetry I liked the most. I have since joined my school’s slam poetry team and plan on continuing to compete in the Bay Area Unified District Poetry Slam until I graduate from LAHS. I hope I can incorporate my poetry and others’ within my projects at Freestyle.

Other than poetry, I enjoy music (all kinds), visual art, and my secret addiction is binge watching documentaries (non-nature centered preferably). In my free time I also like to upcycle clothes. This is when you take clothes you no longer wear or are outdated, and change them by adding or subtracting something to make a more attractive piece of clothing.

In the other sections of my website, you will see me exhibit how I learned to use unconventional forms to express myself through the several units. Through my major projects at Freestyle, I’ve been able to enhance my techniques on several different applications such as Pro Tools, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver. I've enjoyed having the opportunity to produce what I, myself, wanted, and having the ability to self-improve what I made to create an overall amazing piece of work.

The images below are linked to each of my unit portfolio websites. There are four units in each year, and two years spent at Freestyle, equating a total of eight websites I will be making in my Digital Media class. Since each unit has a different focus, each individual website showcases the projects I completed during those units.

 

Conceptual
The purpose of this conceptual project was to create something that at first glance did not completely make sense to the viewer, yet allowed them to create their own meaning of the piece. However, once reading the artist’s concept statement, the viewer is able to understand the true meaning of the work.
Narrative
The narrative project focused on telling a compelling story without the use of dialogue. The projects created in my design and digital media classes were all based around the short story I wrote in English called a flash-fiction. In design, I created a image with a creature encapsulating my flash-fiction story, and in digital media I created a voice recording of my short story with cool background sounds and self-composed music.
Documentary
For the documentary unit, we learned how to showcase an interesting person, place or idea. We wrote a paper based on primary sources and first-hand research in addition to designing magazine articles or books to go with it.
Explorations
For the explorations unit, our goal was to adress the question, "How can you find, explore, and or expand your passion?" Through our projects within our sevral classes, we tried to improve upon a specific self-selected skill set that adresses Freestyle Academy's 21st Century Skills.