Dance Dosti

Dance Dosti was a project created with the intention of providing dance fitness videos for everyone but with particular focus on ensuring they were accessible for blind and partially sighted people.
"Dance Dosti is here to support you to take part in regular dance, and to improve your wellbeing, while enjoying the experience. Our free sessions are created as short-bursts of activity to help you fit it in around your daily life, when and where you want. "

Dance Dosti is based on an 8 week fitness program in which participants can partake in two classes a week though the site is structured in such a way that you can repeat classes you enjoy, take them out of order or do as many as you like!

Each session is around 15 minutes long and all sessions are available in English, Bengali Hindi and Gujarati with both standing and seated versions.
The sessions are led by a team of six experienced dance instructors and the project is a partnership between Step Change Studios and Metro Blind Sport, and supported by Vision Foundation.

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The creation process of Dance Dosti ran over two months and culminated in a website offering 128 dance fitness videos offering not just an English version but videos in Bengali, Hindi and Gujarati too.

The videos are created in a simple visual style typically sticking to a strong Black/White contrast to make them as accessible as possible for those with different visual capabilities; this is then combined with a very descriptive VoiceOver to provide as much direction as possible with the intention of them being accessible to all.

The website is set up with an accessibility to widget to further aid this and allow anyone visiting the website the opportunity to take part in the project.

Working as the sole videographer on this project I filmed and edited all the videos on the site as well as capturing photographs of the process along the way; working with the dancers I ensured that the edit I created suited the intentions they had when choreographing their routines. The video shots has to stay simple and consistent throughout so as to aid in keeping them accessible.

I also created numerous social media assets such as gifs and interview sound bites to help promote the project once the website became live as well as providing dancer headshots and more artistic poses to go alongside the main project trailer and short promo videos.
A collection of these can be found below: