PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Brown sophomore Felege Gebru won third place in the variety/alternative category of the 36th College Television Awards for his video project Brown Cypher 2014.

The awards, presented by the Television Academy Foundation, were presented Thursday, April 23, 2015, at a ceremony in Los Angeles.

Gebru’s video is the second installment in a series showcasing the talents of freestyle rappers from Brown. The black and white videos feature students taking turns rapping, also known as a cypher.

Gebru created his first video, Freshman Cypher 2014, as the final project for his Foundation Media class, taught by Edward Osborn. After the success of the first cypher, he made the second video for Exploration in Video Art, also taught by Osborn.

Gebru was introduced to freestyling his freshman year and decided to incorporate it into a school project after he and his friends weren’t able to create a video cypher during their free time.

He hopes the idea of the videos catches on with other students at Brown and other universities.

“The main goal of these videos is to spark an interest by other groups of freestyle rappers from college campuses all around to make cyphers of their own and cultivate a tradition of doing so on a semester basis,” Gebru said. “This was successful on the account that we got Columbia University to make a response cypher of their own. The plan is to make these cyphers every semester with the hope that this tradition grows with time as a form of creative self-expression.”

Several other students took part in the creation of the Brown Cypher 2014 project. Jacob Goldberg, Cole Moore, and Lynn Tachihara did the camera work; the producer was Philip Mathieu; and the rappers were Jahi Abdur-Razzaq, Nathaniel Burke, John Filmanowicz, Felege Gebru, Aditya Kumar, Keston McMilan, and Charles Park.