OLPC Ethiopia/Cultural content

Background

Melaku Belay and another professional Ethiopian dancer visited the ecbp offices in October 2008. They performed various traditional Ethiopian dances (featuring traditional dress) from different regions.

Nicholas von Wolff recorded videos of the performances. These have been cut up into various short clips.

A photographer took a number of photos of the performances.

All content is being published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license on the Internet Archive.

The project goal is to take these resources and produce free educational resources to be distributed on the XO laptops distributed within Ethiopia. In future, we aim to complement the media collection with audio recordings.

Community involvement with these projects is encouraged and very much appreciated.

Recording and conversion

The dances were recorded in a makeshift studio at ecbp headquarters. The files were retrieved from the camera and cut up into several short .avi files (DV video, PCM audio). These were published on the Internet Archive:

• http://www.archive.org/details/AmharaTraditionalDance2Seconds
• http://www.archive.org/details/GuragignaTraditionalDance

The videos can be converted to a resolution and format suitable for the XO using:

ffmpeg2theora -x 360 -y 288 -v 7 --nosound foo.avi

Sound was discarded as there was no music playing; these amazing dancers were dancing to silence!

Applications

Ethiopian traditional media content bundle

We want to produce an interactive guide to Ethiopian media for children. On the front page, the regions are listed, with a still photo of the regional dress. We wanted to show short animated GIFs of all the 7 regions on the front page, but the XO does not have enough processing power to show 7 animated gifs at once.

The still photos on the front page were generated by taking the .avi videos, and converting each frame to a PNG file:

mplayer -vo png foo.avi

Then I picked a decent-looking png file and resized it, outputting as still.png:

convert -resize 25% foo.png still.png

When they click through the initial page, they see a low-resolution animated gif of one of the dance clips, and can click through to more full-screen videos of the dance.

The animated gifs were produced by taking the png files, taking every 1 in 3 frames (1, 3, 6, 9, ...) and discarding the rest. Then I converted them to small gifs:

mogrify -resize 25% *.png

And then I used gifsicle to produce a looping animated gif:

gifsicle -O2 --loop --delay 14 --colors 256 *.gif > front.gif

We aim to add further regional information to each page in future.

Memorize games

There are a number of opportunities to produce Memorize games from this kind of media. For example, one game would involve matching the music (as audio) to the dance (either as a still photo, or preferably as a short video).