Learn to dance alone, then learn to dance together. That was the idea behind this project. Unfortunately, this was a low-budget venture in both time and money, so creating original photography with a Joe McNally style flair for dance wasn’t a possibility.

Instead, I used a set of stock imagery that got the job done nicely. I designed the campaign to compel with vibrant color and believable, implied movement of the subjects, bolstered by the amazing motion blur Photoshop technique popularized by Joe Cavazos. Unfortunately, like so many things, the program was forced to shutdown just before launch due to COVID, but the print designs were some of my favorites that I made in 2020. The hand-drawn type was custom made by my teammate, Tyler Hoffman.

One particularly annoying discovery I made during this project was that the algorithms for most stock image sites overwhelmingly return images of only white dancers, regardless of the addition of search terms like "black dancer" or "latina bgirl." It took me a lot of extra time to search for stock images of POC dancers. I not only learned the pixel stretch technique doing this work, but that stock site search algorithms are also probably racist.

Incidentally, Shutterstock was the least racist of all the stock sites I used to search for imagery.