'Menace II Society' filmmaker tackles 'Crysis 3'

• Web series introduces transformed New York
• First episode lands online Dec. 12
• Video game hits retail Feb. 19, 2013

Another big video game franchise is getting a web video treatment from a filmmaker.

Albert Hughes, who directed Menace II Society and From Hell with brother Allen, is helming a seven-episode series based on Crysis 3, the futuristic first-person shooter due Feb. 19 for PCs, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. "The 7 Wonders of Crysis 3" series will begin hitting next week on Dec. 12 with debut of the first episode "Hell of a Town."

Each episode will explore one of the seven areas in the game's setting, New York City in 2047, which has been encased in a "nanodome." It's there that main character Prophet continues his battle against the Cell Corporation.

Hughes says that when he was introduced to the game's environment, it reminded him of a National Geographic show World Without Humans. "It became just overgrown jungles and rain forests. That's the closest thing I've seen rendition-wise to what is going on in the nanodome," he says. "New York is like a rain forest. It's like a jungle. There are swamps and levels where you are almost in the clouds because you are on broken down skyscrapers. … It's a very eerie strange kind of environment."

Describing himself as a retired gamer – "I was a big sports guy in the Nineties with NBA Live and Madden." – Hughes used says that he "took my ignorance as an advantage. They were not coming to me because I was a gamer, they were coming for the filmmaker side."

Crytek is known for its visual prowess and the new game wowed Hughes, who in the past who several years earlier had worked on a Ghost Recon game. "This time I think I was more shocked by the lighting and the grading and how photorealistic everything has gotten," he says. "I was really blown away and surprised and shocked by level of detail."

When it came to setting up shots and directing the sequences, Hughes says the Crytek designers had, within the game development software, all the tools that filmmakers need. He had to restrain himself from moving camera angles just for the sake of it. The world itself is a gem," he says. "I don't need to do anything special to tell the audience, 'Hey, look at this.' When you see one still from that world, you are like 'Oh, my god'."

The Crysis 3 web series comes on the heels of the Halo 4 prequel series Forward Unto Dawn. Hughes expects projects like these to become commonplace going forward. "This is a new generation. They may be into the theater experience but they are also into their iPads and iPhones and laptops," he says. Studios are "going to the Web and using TV and, of course, using apps and different kinds of mediums to get the marketing across."

Webisodes were created to flesh out the back story of characters in Hughes' last film The Book of Eli. "It doesn't matter what the subject is as long as it is good and the story shows through," he says.