Film making is essentially storytelling, I know its obvious to most of us but I brought it up as it greatly simplifies the discussion and analysis because we have abstracted out the technical side of film making (technical side has its own importance though, I agree) and we are left with bare minimum which almost all of us understand from very childhood when our Dada/Dadi ji used to tell us bed-time stories. We will be assuming that story is good enough to be told and will focus on how to tell it.
First of all, what exactly is story telling? lets say you have a story, you understands it, you feel every single dimension of it, its every character, every bit of it make perfect sense to you. Now story telling means you transfer this info to somebody else such that he also feels the same way about this story as you do. It is the measure of how successfully you told it. Now lets see why do you feel the way you feel about a story. Lets take a example: you are a divorced person so you must have experienced various phases from newly married one to divorced one and if a story consist of happenings related to those phases then you are in a better position to understand and appreciate it but a bachelor might not appreciate them and here comes the art (why art, why not science?) of storytelling: no matter some one has a personal experience with those phases, if you can make him feel it the right way, you are done. First of all it seems possible, every normal person has first hand experience with happiness, sadness, grief , trust, betrayal, humor etc etc. And whatever that alien phase of your story is, it essentially consist of these human psychic elements. So basically you have to present that phase in such sequence of steps, for film making purpose a step can be a scene which will have one of those human psychic elements in its core, that it will have the desired effect on a rational being. We still haven't reached to a practical method of storytelling. Well I don't think there is such a method. I find it very difficult to break things down into even more smaller logical/meaningful units any further in a simple way. First of all , I think, it depends on story to story exactly how to represent it so that other can absorb it as you intend it to be and more importantly this is why I feel it is an art, there are no definite steps or procedure to do it, it is in your nature or/and it comes though experience. Although we can go deeper into it, introducing human psychology and behavioral aspects into the picture, but that is a whole another story, actually that is THE whole story (about film making), but lets save that for a different post, I am not sure I will be returning to that in near future as I don't have ideas clear enough to be presented.
But this small discussion above can help a lot in analysis. Lets pick some obvious bits. If a story consist of such idea/concept with which most of us are familiar then obviously it will be accepted easily by us. For example if a story depicts love in a familiar way: like in college/work place/travel etc, where two person meet, get to know each other, knowing goes to liking and Bam! they are in love. We all are familiar with this concept may be because we have gone through it, have seen people going though it or have seen so many Bollywood movies that it automatically make sense ! (so we are making use of movies to make sense out of movies, its like bootstrapping :), never mind, it was a joke meant for CS guys). Point is that we easily buy this concept (recall big Bollywood success: DDLJ, KKHH, DTPH... ..). On the other hand if it is a more of a alien way of love (recall Bodyguard's phone fiasco) then its unlikely that we agree with the story teller and may be we will be laughing or getting psyched in our chairs when hero proposes heroin. Here problem wasn't the concept itself but the unconvincing way it was told in. If you have seen "Sirf Tum" then recall that it had the same concept but the way it was told was very convincing and in fact touching. It really illustrates the art of story telling. Just to point out, a familiar idea doesn't mean simple idea. Take Inception, it had a intellectually challenging concept but well familiar. We all dream, its a universal experience and if you can recall your dream then you would feel that there was a time expansion (at least I do, may be I am crazy !). So core of story was easy grasped, but yeah, there was more to Inception, Nolan build a mind-blowing world on this core, in a very compelling and impeccable way.
Now in the last I would like to emphasize that good storytelling and good movie (the one you enjoy watching) are not exactly the same thing. Like what if a story is itself not enjoyable, then what is the point of telling it? and sometime storytelling itself may be wrong but deviation may result into even more enjoyable movie. And we have left out technical side of movie, today there is a big scope of visual effects, animation etc which can significantly enhance the entertainment level keeping the same story. Also the real challenge is to introduce audience to that part of their consciousness which they have never experienced before, that give rise to so called "masterpiece".
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