After we were split into groups based on our strengths and weaknesses, we spent class brainstorming possible ideas for our third assignment. We were prompted to look at the Are you Happy? and Viewfinders projects for inspiration. This gave us a general idea of how we should tackle the project. We started a list of possible themes and mediums we could use. These included commuting, anxiety, boredom and sadness (themes) and vox pops, atmospheric footage and social media posts (mediums).

One theme we agreed upon being interesting was boredom. While we didn’t go much further in class, I thought I would use this blog post to look into the idea a little bit further. What I’ve found is a number of articles talking about boredom and its benefits, as well as a general consensus that it is difficult to define. It appears to be a subject with a lot of depth and room for commentary. Hopefully through the project we can try to explain what boredom is and what it means.

In terms of the mediums we briefly discussed how we could interview people about boredom and their own experiences regarding it. We also talked a bit about possible social experiments regarding boredom. I remembered something I’d previously read about people choosing pain over boredom and brought it up as an example. We tossed around some ideas about some social experiments we could film with people around RMIT, possibly giving an incentive to sit still for 15-20 minutes and allow us to film them. They might be a bit too difficult to work out but these ideas have helped us continue to move forward in the brainstorming process.

As we move forward we’ll hopefully continue to develop some interesting and fresh ideas that we can start developing soon, and I’ll keep this space updated with them.