The purty green Kirill logo

Kirill is a ten-part drama focusing on a fugitive (David Schofield of Pirates fame) in a desolate bunker who is trying to contact one Vivienne Villars, a London journalist who is in grave danger. Villars, a blogger, is in regular contact with “Quantum Stu”, another blogger who signed up to his own blog on the same day as her - the day that CERN’s LHC (Large Hadron Collider) was switched on earlier this year.

Kirill (David Schofield)

To appreciate Kirill you will need to read the two blogs (or at least scan them) as well as watching the videos, which are bite sized and good-looking:

“The episodes are about three minutes — pretty much the same as a song which we felt was about right for the medium,” says Peter Bale the executive producer of MSN UK on the forums.

Kirill drawing

The idea is to piece together the story for yourself. You’d also do well to check out the extra content. As for the blogs - which are as good as the videos as far as I’m concerned, they featured videos, audio files and CCTV footage, with regular links to interesting sources (often CERN or science related, without ever getting overly heavy for the casual reader). They also link to each other and are often in the form of responses - Viv will grudgingly respond to Stu’s put-downs and vice versa, there’s a nice bit of chemistry going on here. They also feature funny related videos and on Stu’s blog – music videos. While Quantum Stu is a little less focused on Viv’s findings at the outset - indeed he takes every opportunity to rubbish her “conspiracy theories” as he calls them, when Viv discovers footage which suggests professors connected with the company giant Nomi are being kidnapped by two black-clad assailants, Stu backs up the science part. All-in-all it’s an interesting project and it has kept me out of mischief for a few hours already. There are two videos up so far - “Tagged” and “Water” and plenty of blog posts to read through. I can hear you groaning, but it is worth investing time in this as the payback is pretty decent, especially when there hasn’t (at least to my knowledge) been anything like this before.

Viv - a fellow blogger

Things to check out:

Kirill (requires MS Silverlight - free download)

Vivienne Villars Blog

Quantum Stu’s Blog

Nomi Futures Website (Umbrella Corporation, anyone?)

don't go outside

Episodes 1 & 2 (contains spoilers!)

Here I’ve written out the things that might be important in the first two episodes. They are only three minutes long though if you need to give yourself a memory jog :p.

Episode #1 “Tagged”

This episode sees chalk numbers crossed out as we pan towards Kirill, a stubbly man counting to 100 and falling asleep. He talks about hide and seek as his computer runs a database search. Kirill shoots a water pipe which promptly bursts and he mends it. We see a board on his wall and he crosses out “Sleeping with gun in hand” among other rules he has set out for himself (see picture 3). Finally his computer’s screen flashes “match found” and Kirril’s eyes sparkle, “Gotcha!” is his response to the photo of Vivienne on his monitor.

Episode #2 “Water”

Things have got rather icy and Kirill talks about the temperature and staying alive. “Ten days is a long time depending on temperature,” he notes. I’m guessing this refers to the ten episodes/days.

I’ll probably do a follow-up Kirill post in a week or so. Stay tuned, and remember to check it out!