Mark Staufer Explores The Numinous Place

Mark Staufer is the creator of The Numinous Place, a multimedia mystery novel that features interactive film, audio and “other media” aspects like the ability on th epart of the reader to see complete news stories set in the book’s universe and offering clues and insights into the larger story at play.He’s also a schoolmate of leading man (and Superman’s dad) Russell Crowe, who has lent the considerable cache of his name to promotional materials that boast his backing of the project’s Kickstarter page, which wraps its funding window next week.Drawing from a wide variety of influences, the names of which it invokes on the project’s website to give fans and potential backers a sense for what the offbeat, insanely ambitious project is actually like, The Numinous Place is described on its website as the natural evolution of books, something that integrates the technology already available to readers who are reading them on their iPads and laptops to make the experience a deeper and richer one than either a book or a standalone film/video project can provide (notoriously, books get to tell a deeper story than movies because movies are restricted by runtime and budget. On the other hand, movies allow the viewer to interact with the characters in an immediate, visceral way that doesn’t come easily to the printed page). The result, from what we can see online so far, is a fascinating and complex multimedia novel that arguably shares more DNA with video games than with the traditional novel.Staufer joined ComicBook.com to talk about putting the work together, what it means to him to work on a project so dramatically different from anything else he’s done, and where to go from The Numinous Place.What I noticed right off about the press release is the sheer number of references it drops as touchstones for the audience. It compares your work to everything from The Da Vinci Code to The Matrix to Myst. Do you worry about inundating potential backers with that imagery and leaving them worried that the work is a bit scattered?I guess what we’re trying to get across is that The Numinous Place is something new in terms of entertainment, and it’s difficult to compare to just one medium. It has the historic conspiracy/cosmic detective elements of the DaVinci Code book, the creepy sci-fi feeling of The Matrix movie and the immersive first-person attributes of Myst the game. In the end it’s an adventure-world created by merging all types of story-telling techniques – video, audio, images, narrative – and therefore feels incredibly realistic.With something of this kind of scope and magnitude, I always have to ask: what happens if this doesn’t get funded through Kickstarter? It seems too far along to just slam on the brakes, doesn’t it?For creatives and inventors Kickstarter is a most liberating and powerful tool. I decided to go this way after potential investors wanted too much equity in my project. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting the word out to as many people as possible and driving traffic to the Kickstarter page. We have a few days left, and I’m not even considering failure as an option.I’m stubborn that way, especially when it’s taken me 10 years to create this thing.