Blocking and lighting, the two most important things to a good shot. A well shot and edited film will always win out over a poorly lit, poorly blocked, poorly edited film done on the most expensive hardware.
Practice telling stories. For real, "tell" folks stories. Figure out the begining, middle, and end of the stories, the point of them. Telling stories face to face with people is the best practice for film, IMHO. Because film is the same thing, you just don't get to judge your audience and change the story mid-telling. Telling stories face to face with people, you learn what does and doesn't work. If there's a famous story teller locally (I'm Cherokee, I know professional story tellers, they're awesome), go listen to them and anylise what they do to make a story great.
After that, it's blocking, lighting, editing.