That's exactly what I wanted to say: Movies are the latest evolution in storytelling. So the question is: How can we use technology to create a better way to tell stories?

If you're a writer you can write a book just by yourself, and there are already many writers that create awesome stories. Furthermore, from all the movies I've seen and all the books I've read, I think that the story in an average book tends to be of higher quality than the story in an average movie.

An interesting goal for a really disruptive storytelling technology would be to create a tool that allows a writer to create something that looks like a movie but doesn't require much more work than writing a book.

It's already possible to use computers to create a movie without using any cameras, or building physical sets, but it still is a labor intensive and expensive process. Right now you need:

* Voice actors to act all the parts

* Modelers to create all the 3D models

* Texture artists

* Animators

* Sound effect technicians

* Composer & musicians

* A rendering farm to render the movie

Let's look at each of these items and see if we can find a way to work around it.

We can start with the easier ones. You don't need a rendering farm, you can use a game engine to render the story in real time using the GPU.

Music & sound effects are also easy to solve. Computers can synthesize music and there are already many composers who allow you to use their music for free or by paying a very small one time fee. You also can buy at a low price a library of sound effects, but below I propose an even better solution for that.

Next we have to look at models & textures. This is harder to solve but I think there might be one solution inspired in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. When you install World of Warcraft on your computer you're installing the whole world with all the models and textures, so that when you play the game all of them are loaded on demand from your local hard disk. So, any company that wants to create a tool that enables a single writer to create a whole movie by himself, would have to invest in creating all the models & textures for a large array of different locations (urban, country, desert, jungle, interiors, exteriors, etc.) that the audience would install on their computer. Then writers would have all those locations available to use for their stories. Furthermore, it would be a good idea to allow third parties to create new locations that can be added to the set of available locations. On top of that, if you are already installing all those models & textures on people's computers then you can also throw in good sound effects library.

All of the above is easy, in the sense that, although it requires a large investment to create a good set of models & textures for the locations, it doesn't require any technological innovation.

Now comes the hard part. The part where we still haven't developed the needed technology. We need digital actors that can play their roles by themselves. The writer should only be required to give them their lines & stage directions. This would require some more research in how to improve text to speech synthesizers & procedural animation. But I do believe that's something that could be solved in the next ten years.