For The Negotiation, I took on the role of actor, which is something I haven’t actually done for a media assignment since I started uni. It definitely wasn’t something I prioritised doing; my ultimate goal in media is to be an established soundtrack composer, and clearly acting doesn’t exactly fit within the same skill set.  With that considered I volunteered for the role anyway, and having gotten over the monumental obstacle of not cracking up with laughter every two minutes, I ended up performing a role I was pretty happy with. I’m not going to be too critical of my acting, as again it’s not something I’m exactly striving to be good at.

Onto the work itself, I think the outcome could have been improved in a few ways. Firstly, while a sterile, mostly bland environment was what we were going for, there was definitely still more things we could have done to achieve that effect but in a more aesthetically pleasing way. The plain white tiles behind Neville were designed to give him a very serious and somewhat emotionless effect, however, I feel that it takes quite a lot of focus away from his face, due to the brightness of the tiles and the shading on his features. We were fairly limited in terms of space in our set, and while we did use bounce boards to lessen the lighting effect slightly, I think visually the film could’ve benefitted with a slight adjustment. Second, I think the camera angles could have used some more variety; as the scene gradually amps up in tension, I think it could have been complimented nicely by faster transitions, more close ups, and potentially a handheld camera, something I think worked really well in our practise run. These film as it is reuses a lot of shots, and the lack of movement definitely does sap interest from the viewer in my opinion. Again, as we were quite limited with space, we didn’t have the room to create any wider shots that could have added more variety, particularly in the beginning, but there was definitely room to make the camera convey the mood we were going for. Besides these issues, I think The Negotiation is a faithful adaptation of Matt’s observation, and I think our group’s cohesion allowed us to put out something with a lot of positives.