Road Construction Video Builds a Following Among Kids and Adults

Fred Levine is breaking new and profitable ground with road construction. His children’s video on the subject, “Road Construction Ahead,” grossed more than $1.5 million in its first year, selling more than 75,000 copies.

The film begins with little boys building a road in their sandbox, then shifts to a step-by-step documentary of how an actual highway is built. It aims at kids, but may fascinate quite a few adults, too.

Nearly all the thousands of cassettes sold by Levine so far have gone out the front door and into the mail from his Main Street offices in Montpelier.

Sales have been brisk, but “that doesn’t make me a millionaire,” Levine said, explaining that he has a staff to pay and substantial expenses in advertising. He has run ads in most major newspapers and magazines in the United States. And there are always equipment needs--a new professional video camera, for instance.

But the rapid sales strides of his company, Focus Video Inc., and his direct control over shooting and editing, does make Levine a highly unusual one-man show in an industry dominated by giant corporations.

The key to his success isn’t some “artistic edge,” Levine said, “but the time and commitment I put into the production.” Other video producers may give themselves only two weeks for a project like “Road Construction Ahead”; he may take two weeks just getting to know the work crew and the layout of the site.

The shooting and cutting of the road-building video, finished in time for Christmas, 1992, took most of a year.

Levine applied the same total-immersion technique to his second video, “Fire and Rescue,” which went on sale in September. For months, Levine lived with a radio scanner on to let him know of fire alarms in his neighborhood.

For him, that meant most of Vermont. He worked with fire departments in at least 12 Vermont towns, but also traveled to Boston and Providence, R. I. As soon as “Fire and Rescue” was done, he said, he was “out the door and shooting planes and trains.” His short list of future titles includes “Cleared for Landing,” “All Aboard” and “Blasting Zone.”

Levine’s passion for detail and accuracy is evident in “Road Construction Ahead.” Not just children, but parents can also learn a lot from it about how a highway is built. From removing old asphalt to digging, scraping, blasting and rolling, the action will hold most youngsters’ attention.

But Levine also respects the slow, meticulous nature of the work he’s portraying, as well as children’s curiosity about how things are done. He clearly grasps that young viewers don’t mind repetition, so long as the scene is gripping.

Perhaps that’s because his own children--Ian, 7; Miles, 5, and Mariah, 1--are the “test audience” for his work. In fact, his older kids’ close attention to a Sesame Street segment on bulldozers gave Levine the idea for a full-length video on the subject. Before that, Levine had done free-lance public relations or advocacy videos for local businesses or state agencies.

The success of the road-construction video is easy to understand, says Peggy Charren, a consultant on children’s television issues who founded the now-disbanded Action for Children’s Television. “Anybody who stops by a construction site to watch knows how attractive that stuff is,” she said, noting that she saw Levine’s ad and promptly ordered a copy for her grandchildren.

Beyond that, Charren said, Levine is “clued into something every parent knows is a great need.” He is producing instructive, wholesome, yet entertaining material. “It’s comforting,” she added, “that someone can beat the mass-marketing system.”

But that “system” has its eye on Levine. He has gotten inquiries about buying the rights to his videos or buying the company and has been asked about doing a TV show.

Levine is determined to keep such suitors at bay, although he has hired an attorney who specializes in entertainment law to help him wade through the offers. He also plans to hire a manager to handle the company’s mounting administrative load.

Above all, Levine wants to keep focused on shooting and editing. He has tried to farm out some of that work--the creative heart of his enterprise--but it hasn’t worked.

“I had someone else shoot, but he didn’t shoot like I would,” Levine said. Nothing, apparently, can substitute for those days of camera work on the road or the hours of editing in his home on the slopes of Mt. Hunger in Middlesex, Vt.

There’s one other facet of the work that he wouldn’t sacrifice: stints on the phone taking orders from customers who call in on Focus Video’s number, (800) 843-3686. He finds it “inspiring and instructive” to hear callers’ thanks for creating the video or comments on how their children responded to the show. And he doesn’t mind getting ideas about what his next project should be, either.