Hi there! My name is Makeda Yezalaleul, and I’m currently a Senior at Freestyle Academy. Last year my elective was Digital Media, and now I’m focusing on Design. Both classes have given me the opportunity to cultivate my passions for music, photography, designing, storytelling, and poetry. Outside of my media work, I spend my time rearranging/upcycling clothes, listening to music, and enjoying time with friends and family.
For my Senior Showcase, I am excited to share my Junior Documentary and Senior Zenith projects; these pieces reflect my best work and most meaningful growth during my Freestyle career. My documentary focus was my grandfather with an emphasis on how his life has impacted me and helped shape me into the person I am today. Throughout this project, I conducted academic research to maintain the credibility of my book and coordinated interviews with people to gain insight on his life through other’s perspectives. My documentary project taught me the value of intellectual engagement with your elders and the different modes of self-reflection which become of those insightful interactions. For my Zenith, I created a poetry anthology featuring what I believe are the best poems I’ve written throughout high school and during this project. During Zenith, I wrote, discussed with others, revised, and illustrated all graphical aspects of my book. I truly felt as though I took my poetry and storytelling skills to the next level, and I’m proud of the concise, professional product.
I would like some feedback focused on your reading experience of these two works. Did the documentary inspire you to analyze your personal familial relationships and reflect upon what you have gained from them? Did you understand the poems in the anthology and feel a sense of cohesiveness? In the documentary book, do you believe I shared my grandfather’s story clearly and did a good job intertwining it with my own? In either work, where were you left with ambiguities or questions? In short, if I decided to rework these pieces, what would you suggest I do differently?
Next year, I plan to study Communications and Marketing at Loyola Marymount University. I am looking forward to living in LA, working with my professors on new projects, and networking with professionals in my desired field of work.
You can reach me at makeda.yezalaleul@gmail.com
Documentary Book
The purpose of the documentary project was to highlight an influential person, place, or idea within the community. I chose to document the life of my grandfather, Truneh Wolde Selassie.
Like most projects at Freestyle, my three junior year classes of English, Design, and Digital Media worked together to form the completed products this website presents. I wrote my documentary research paper in English. In my Digital Media class, I created an introduction video to my documentary topic in After Effects. Finally, in Design, I formatted my published book using InDesign. The writing process was more difficult than I expected. Coming up with the idea of what I wished to document didn’t demand much, on the other hand, actually getting the words on the paper was much more challenging than I expected. Using InDesign was fairly simple. We learned how to create styles for certain things such as our paragraphs and headers, which then allowed us to use those same formats throughout the book, as opposed to constantly having to change things to look a certain way. The documentary website I made was also pretty easy to create, due to it following the same structure as the previous websites I had created in Digital Media.
As a first-generation Ethiopian-American, I have been immersed in Ethiopian culture throughout my life which has helped me identify as such. However, saying I’m American comes with ease while claiming I’m Ethiopian is coupled with hesitance. Growing up in the U.S. and chiefly abiding by its societal standards and not Ethiopia’s, has routed my mindset to be more American-specific. Not only that, but my inability to fluently speak Amharic (the common Ethiopian dialect) and my literal distaste for Ethiopian food make the overarching sense of disconnect from my ethnicity only that much more potent.
Be that as it may, I’ve come to align myself with the idea of ancestral roots embodying a person. It’s never been hard to discuss where my parents are from or where their parents and those prior lived. If anything, it’s extremely prideful because of the success they’ve achieved and their partaking in the American dream. This is why I chose the topic of my grandfather’s life for my documentary piece. His story from humble beginnings to an author, pastor, and influential presence within his community is awe-inspiring. Through leading a fulfilling life by manifesting sincere Ethiopian morals and Christian values, Kindye has served as an example to many within his community. I believe that my perspective on my grandfather’s life is important because it tells me something about who I am. After having discussed several things in which we had never spoken about before, I came to realize that knowing the journey that those before you have traveled can shape the journey that lies ahead of you. Having a distinct sense of where you’re from can help you get to know who you truly are. Knowing yourself also solidifies your assessment of personal concepts which may have been previously foreign. This intrapersonal understanding leads you towards directions in which you can further yourself and your future.
I wrote this book with the intention to tell a foreigner’s story because far too often, immigrant stories go untold. We have so much to learn from their world which can be beneficial and enriching. I think it’s essential to listen to the accounts told by those foreign to us. I also understand that there are many against immigration to the United States. Nonetheless, it’s important to remember that whether it be about fearing immigrants themselves or fearing a loss in nationalism, America’s legend is indeed composed of immigrant memoirs.
Documentary IntroVid
Online Book
Link to where you can purchase my book.
Zenith Project
My love for poetry was sparked in the eighth grade when I was asked to write a poem about where I’m from. Since then, I’ve looked forward to each poetry unit in my English classes and collaborating with fellow Los Altos High School slam poetry team members each year. With poetry having been such a key part of my high school experience, it was easy for me to decide earlier on to create a poetry anthology –a collection of poems– for my zenith project. The research paper I wrote in English class corresponded not to the entirety of my poetry book, but to a single poem which touched on race relations and the Black experience in America. Instead of trying to write about such a broad topic, I focused on the issue of cultural appropriation with emphasis on the African American community. While I gained new and insightful information during the process of writing this paper, I was not dissuaded from continuing with my initial idea of a poetry anthology featuring several works of different subject matter.
I was excited to write more poetry, especially considering the fact that the zenith was taking place around the same time as the Unified District Poetry Slam, which LAHS’s slam team enters each year. This competition and the possibility of winning served as an added incentive to write the best poetry that I could.
Throughout the design process of this project, I relied on my peers in my elective class for support and constantly asked them for possible suggestions or revisions I could implement to my book layout. My desk table partner, Kyra, acted as a huge aid and comforter to me for the duration of the zenith project. Our daily collaboration with each other fueled us to push on, and produce the best work that we could.
For the graphical aspects of my book, I was inspired by an artist who used interesting scanning techniques within a magazine. The way the artist displayed the scanned images emulated a unique sense of tangibility which I wanted to re-create for my pieces. I was also inspired by the simplistic illustrations Rupi Kaur utilized in her poetry anthology, Milk and honey. Having such easy to understand images placed directly beside her illuminating poetry allowed her words to truly speak for themselves.
The biggest problem I ran into that I didn’t account for when creating my zenith calendar, was the writing process being very long. I thought that if I worked on writing the poems and creating their corresponding illustrations simultaneously, I could easily lose track of time and become unable to reach my intended goal. Thus, it was easier to just complete writing first, then spend all my time working on the art. However, due to my writing process taking longer than expected, I was unable to create a digital aspect of my initial plan for my project. While this was a bit saddening, I made up for what was lost with more poems which I ended up being really proud of.
If I did this project over, I would make it more of a priority to complete the digital parts I wanted to accompany my book in order for an interactive component to exist within my overall project. I believe the 21st Century Skill I improved upon most was creativity since I not only wrote the poems myself, which each have personal value to me, but I also created the designs throughout the book myself. I tried my best to add variety to the poetry composition and illustration art, and I’m proud of the results! The 21st Century Skill I improved upon least would probably be visual literacy since my project media is singular and I did not explore new uses of technology to communicate my message to the public.
This project taught me to accommodate to new situations, especially ones I didn’t excpect. Sometimes in life, things don’t always work out the way you hope they will, and you simply must learn to find a way to work around new roadblocks introduced to you.
I am confident that I elevated my skills and experiences in poetry and graphic design. Looking back at poems I’ve written in past years, I can tell that my writing has matured and developed as well as my stance on issues and prevalent topics in my life. Also, the graphic design elements I used in my documentary book last year seem elementary as compared to that of my poetry anthology.
My zenith project changed the way I look at poetry and how what you write is just as much for other people as it is for you. Others may not have experienced the same stories I shared through the poems I wrote, yet the surprising amount of readers who’ve read my personal poems so far and have expressed feelings of either sympathy or general resonance shows me that my words have power beyond the pages they are written on. It is this special phenomenon that inspires me to continue to write poetry – for myself, and others.