Short Circuits: Video fun with Fred and Ted

Fred arrived in Boston in the early 1980s and has been here since, churning out videos ranging from educational entertainment for children to commercials for corporate customers. One program, his "Adventures of Com-mander Crumbcake," featured a dog who thought he had super-powers but didn't, and had a four-year run on Showtime. Its content was, he says, instructive but fun.

And then Ted came along.

Lexington native Ted Page had left town for a stint with advertising houses in New York but returned to take up residence once again near the old home place and to start his own Boston-based consulting business, Captains of Industry.

Ted says as he began dishing out advice to advertisers, more and more wanted to steer a course to the Web.

And increasingly they had a common concern: "Gee, we've got this great Web site, how do we get people to come?"

The answer for Ted: Fred

Or more precisely, Fred's video.

Early on, the pair collaborated on a DVD for Hancock Financial Services, wrapping compelling video around the information the company wanted to impart.

The project, Fred said, quickly led them to the realization that entertainment (with a splash of information) could be put to corporate use - and that technology was about to open a new door for delivering that creativity.

While fat bandwidth to a critical mass of consumers may be a while off, there are many companies around with powerful intranets. That is the market the pair have targeted with their newly launched company, Fred & Ted Entertainment.

Officially created just three months ago, Fred & Ted has actually been in development for the past few months, funded by Fred Inc. and Captains of Industry. The company is creating what the pair terms "edgy" new programming to be syndicated to other Web sites, as well as customized content for particular companies.

Fred says they held off announcing their presence until they had a product, a customer and a profit - which is where they are now.

Their customer is Workscape Corp., based in Framingham. They will create entertaining "webisodes" for the company's intranet, based around a corporate high tech marathon theme. The idea is to get employees to log on and stay focused on the company's goals.

The stars of the webisodes will be the employees themselves, appearing in updates a couple times a week. They might feature workers guzzling Starbucks coffee at a water stop or working out in their cubicles.

Fred & Ted is also developing off the shelf products that a company can use to draw people to their Web sites and keep them there longer.

"Ask Dr. Clark," for example, features a lab coat-clad, cigarette smoking physician (played by Ted), who fields questions and offers advice on topics ranging from "Is smoking bad for my health?" to "Does size really matter" to "Who killed JFK?"

Each video clip is compressed and can be downloaded quickly over a typical ISDN line or T-1 connection. If you have time to waste at work, samples can be found on their Web site, www.fredandted.com.

You can also view their short film, "There Once was a Man from Pawtucket," that is currently making it around the film festival circuit, and which was the inspiration for the Dr. Clark series.

Another character in the film, Sherry Wingtight, will be repackaged as a financial guru. She will dispense down-to-earth financial information to employees from her kitchen table, using visual diagrams made from handy props such as meatloaf, says Ted.

Currently Fred & Ted has just two employees, Fred and Ted, but they say they hope to have 20 or more within the year, mostly in sales and marketing. The creative work is done entirely by freelancers. A spot shot on a Friday can be edited on Fred's two Media 100 editing machines, and can be online by Monday.

Unlike high-profile West Coast Internet video production companies that have hit the wall of late, Fred says his company can contain costs and target a paying audience that has the bandwidth to make delivery feasible.

So can they deliver the eyeballs?

Well, the star of "The Man from Pawtucket" suffers from ambulatory mortosis, a rare disease in which the patient continues to move long after he has died.

Dr. Clark, at the end of the show, comes on camera to make a pitch for a Web site for the American Ambulatory Mortosis Foundation, a group committed to fighting the dread disease.