Covenant Eyes is a company that provides internet filtering and accountability software.   Their slogan is that parents are not raising kids, they are raising adults.   We felt so strongly about partnering with Covenant Eyes on this Atlanta video production that we flew up to Detroit to do a presentation at their company headquarters.  We were excited to support their mission, which meets a great need in the high-tech world we live in today.

Our task was to promote the company brand and software through a 20- to 30-minute informational piece targeted to a specific audience.  The goal was to explain why parents need education on best practices for internet use by children in the home and on mobile devices.  When your child goes to a friend’s house, you of course want to keep tabs on where they are going.   But how do you know where your child is going on the internet?

Computer use is such a major part of how we live today.  Parents can feel overwhelmed by the constant pace of new technology and the unfamiliar territory of internet monitoring.  The video explains why certain measures are needed and how to put them into practice.

Our clients flew several experts down from Detroit for the Atlanta video production.  We spent about 3 or 4 days interviewing the company founder, as well as doctors, therapists, and motivational speakers in diverse settings.

The camera crew pulled in gadgets and lighting to get the look and feel that the clients wanted.  It was an enormous amount of filming in a short amount of time.  We soaked up every ounce of time scheduled, and through constant effort managed to stay entirely on schedule.

We learned the courageous story of the founder of Covenant Eyes, who had overcome great personal tragedy — the loss of his wife and children in a car accident.  He was able to continue on and later remarried.

In the course of raising stepchildren, he realized that the internet seemed to be a vital part of life for the 12 year old in the family.  Yet, there was no way to protect the child from the dangers of the internet.  Seeing a great need for accountability software, he decided to start Covenant Eyes.

The software provides a filter that limits content to the type of material approved by parents for their children.  As children mature, the filter can be adjusted and more content allowed.  Eventually, the goal is to remove all filtering.   A mature teenager might be allowed to go anywhere on the internet, but with monitoring and accountability as ongoing safeguards.

Each user has an accountability partner who receives a report on the top three visited sites and at which hours the computer user is most active.  The reports allow accountability partners to dialogue about the nature of each other’s computer use.  As children grow older and start looking up topics, they start looking for answers on the internet.  The software helps to identify those topics of interest to the child so that parents can be the ones to provide answers.

Our interviews included young adults who had grown up with Covenant Eyes software in the home.  They reveal that a great benefit of the software is the dialogue fostered between parents and children.  At the outset, parents need the opportunity to express a simple idea to their children — “there are dangers on the internet that we don’t want you to fall into.”

But the dialogue can go beyond that to even more meaningful topics.  One young person we interviewed shared that he and his father were accountability partners for each other.  In other words, they received each other’s reports!  It provided a great opportunity for man-to-man talks.  The father’s willingness to partner with his son got the message across that anyone — at any age — is vulnerable to temptations on the internet.

With shooting done and the project now entering several weeks of post production, Optimum Productions is proud to be a partner with Covenant Eyes.  With their software and vision, combined with our video production expertise, we hope to educate families, foster communication, and protect young minds and hearts.

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