Exercise: two people communicating

For this exercise I was told to produce a short sequence in which two peope communicate across an off-screen space. To complete the work I had to start filling the gaps of a scene given beforehand. This scene was as follows - added words are in capital letters:

Sarah is seated alone. She is holding something (a book, mobile, other item) that has her attention. She seems distracted, absorbed by what she holds. 

Dan is standing NEAR off across the STREET. He notices Sarah but looks away. 

Sarah looks up for a moment and notices Dan. She reacts with indifference and continues to look at Dan. 

Then he becomes aware that Sarah is looking at him. He looks up at her. 

Sarah smiles at Dan. 

Dan begins to walk towards Sarah. 

Besides the script, I had to take other instructions. I couldn't use wide shots - essential to create the idea of the off-screen space and each shot had to contain ony one of the two characters. 

So, with all these things I sketched out all the frames. The plan is below: 

And that was the result:

Evaluation

Having a look at this film, I must say that I can't see if the off-screen space was achieved or not. I think that it was, but, being sincere, I don't really know. It might be said that the backgoud -the wall - gives coherence to the whole movie and helps us to understand that the two characters are in the same place. But, does this mean that a viewer will interpret that there's a short distance between them? I doubt it. Anyway, I believe that I put what I was asked to put and probably, what is left is basically an atmosphere. Although there was that point indicating to show a reaction of her, I didn't do it. What is more, the truth is that nothing happens there. What's going on here? Nobody knows. Because of that, I consider the exercise a failure. Not too big, but a failure. And that's not good. 

How could I have solved this? Well, I dare to say that making an effort on framing, would have had a fantastic result. I mean, let's imagine for a while a mid shot where we can see a potential linking element. And the character is placed as it wass sketched out previously, which is at one side of the frame. Just having done this instead of having used angles, might have had a better result. And of course, we could have been able to see linking elements apart from the wall. 

A good example of this, Richard's blog. Both protagonists are well placed and the road is the key connection between them. A bad example, María's blog. She did something quite similar to my story, but it's even more difficult to follow the narrative. And she admitted this.