Video Game Director Keith Arem Called to Duty on Frost Road

December 1, 2009
by Ethan Anderton

While most of the action in a video game is controlled by the player, in-game cinematics and voice acting play a huge part in telling the story that you're controlling. So it's no surprise that there's a director behind the game much like a motion picture director. Now Variety reports director Keith Arem, the man behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the biggest and fastest selling video game release in history, is making the jump to features with Frost Road, the story of a young man who awakens from a car accident to discover he is one of few survivors in the aftermath of a mysterious outbreak that's struck a small East coast town.

The main character, who is somehow immune to the contagion, tries to save the remaining survivors as he struggles to prevent the "deadly wave" from spreading across the planet. Sounds like a pretty epic directorial debut. Arem also wrote the script for Frost Road, and going along with the recent trend of package deals for intellectual property, he is also developing this as a graphic novel with co-creator Brandon Humphreys.

And while at first I wasn't sure that a video game director should be jumping into features with a story on this scale, I was humbled by the fact that Arem was responsible for directing, casting and engineering all of the actors for the game, which included 50 Cent, Barry Pepper, Kevin McKidd, Keith David, Billy Murray and Lance Henriksen. In addition to Modern Warfare 2, Arem has also worked on other such cinematic video games as Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Rainbow Six, Silent Hill, Prince of Persia and Ghost Recon, and he has high hopes for the future of video game directors like him to progress to feature films as well:

"[I'm] thrilled to have the opportunity to bring the skills I've honed in the game industry to the big screen. There's an incredible talent pool currently working in the game industry, and I hope that the success of 'Frost Road' will give other creators the chance to show what they can do on a wider canvas."

No pressure, but I think a lot of the future of video game directors making the jump to feature films will ride on the performance of not only Arem as a director, but the film as a box office contender. Once this project starts casting we'll be sure to let you know who Arem casts. As long as it's not 50 Cent, I think we'll be fine. In the meantime, if you want you can check out the website - frostroad.com - but there's not much there yet.

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