Set Teacher Interview Series: Kevin Moll
We’re back with the latest edition of our Set Teacher Interview Series! It’s now been over a year of staying home, masking up, and waiting ever so impatiently for life to return to a new “normal” – and a major element of pre-pandemic life we’re looking forward to is the ability to resume traveling the world. While we’ve been waiting for the day it is safe to do so, we interviewed Kevin Moll, a California Certified Studio Teacher who has traveled the globe working on OLE projects both before and during the pandemic. Read our interview with Kevin below and enjoy the collage of photos from his travels – we hope to be heading to some of these incredible locations soon!
A warning on the call sheet from Kevin’s current Australian production:
Don’t kill Skippy!
About Kevin: Soon after graduating college, Kevin began teaching English as a Foreign Language to students in Japan and Thailand for several years. After deciding to pursue teaching internationally beyond EFL, Kevin decided to go back to graduate school to obtain full teaching credentials at USC. He’d heard a bit about studio teaching and was somewhat intrigued, but intended to pursue international school teaching. Toying with ideas in television unrelated to education, he audited (crashed) a couple of production courses at USC late in his masters and considered trying production. On further research, he realized that a couple of lucky choices he had made, combined with fluency in Japanese, made the road to qualifying as a California Certified Studio Teacher a smoother one than is often the case. Kevin became fully certified within a couple of months after completing his masters degree, and immediately joined the national tour of The Full Monty in California, followed by stops on the East Coast as well as in Japan. Since then, Kevin has worked continuously in education around the globe, including serving as an administrator at a school in Vietnam for three years. He has continued to focus his work on distant-location work, participating in projects from Atlanta to Austria to Australia, and dozens of exciting locales in between!
Transport to a work site in Fiss, Austria.
Base camp for a production in Washington, D.C.
School room with a view in Australia.
Kangaroo warning!
Your path to working with OLE is really exciting, because you were able to combine your passions for international education, travel, and entertainment. What interested you in this role (specifically becoming a California Certified Studio Teacher) and led you to pursue it further?
In the late 1990s, after several years of teaching English as a foreign language to Japanese students in Japan and then Thailand, I decided it was time either to pursue full teaching credentials or to develop other specialized skills. I enjoyed teaching in schools, but I also had a vague interest in television and how it conveys language and culture both to its intended audience and to other audiences. The path to becoming a K-12 teacher, whether in the US or in US-curriculum international schools, was much more obvious to me than TV criticism or production, so I moved forward with a masters and credential program at USC. During the program, I accidentally came to realize that I could add a secondary credential to my pending elementary credential by taking a test in teaching Japanese as a foreign language (I was fluent and literate then), and that the two credentials would qualify me to pursue certification as a California Certified Studio Teacher. I moved immediately in that direction after completing the masters and receiving my credentials..
This might be a long list, but can you name all of the places you’ve traveled to throughout your career?
Studio teaching has taken me to Australia, China, Thailand, Japan, Austria, Mexico, Canada, and, in the US, to New York, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Washington DC, Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and all over California! Within the next couple of years, I hope to conjure up projects in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and more of Europe.
Does your work as a California Certified Studio Teacher (and life on set) differ depending on the country in which a project is filming? How do the local labor laws of the country or local union regulations affect or interact with the California laws that you are there to uphold? Can you explain to our readers why there is a necessity for a California certified teacher to work on projects internationally?
California-based minors who work for California productions outside of California are covered by California’s laws pertaining to work hours and schooling, and that includes having a California Certified Studio Teacher. If the applicable laws or union standards differ from California (as they always do), the more protective law or standard prevails. For example, on one show filmed in a mountain state, guest stars visiting from California had school each day, while the locally-hired background extras (who filled the school hallways and lunchroom) were not schooled if only missing two consecutive days of school at a time. On the other hand, while California allows children to work as late as 10pm on a school night, one state only allows work until 7pm, so that state’s rules apply for the California and local children.
Apart from familiarizing myself with local laws and practices (especially for aspects that are more protective than California), my daily work varies surprisingly little between jurisdictions. However, I do need to explain California laws thoroughly at the beginning of and throughout the production and keep my eyes peeled ahead of time for pitfalls in which the production may plan schedules and activities that aren’t allowable under California laws.
Perhaps the matter I have to explain most often around the world is the need to have a private room/space dedicated to school that also, if possible, allows the students to be spaced out from each other. Often times for 2-3 students, I receive space perfectly suited for a 3-person meeting (such as among a producer, writer, and director), and I have to point out that, even if the students are of the same age, one may be studying Algebra I while the other analyzes poetry. Or there may be initial confusion about the need for even one student to have a separate school room that isn’t the dressing room, as the parent may be holding a business phone meeting in the dressing room (even as the wardrobe department quietly prepares the next costume change) while the student and I record a dance interpretation of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the separate school room.
On occasion, I serve as a general set teacher or unofficial welfare worker for non-California productions that nevertheless seek to have an experienced specialist involved. Once, on a German production in Mexico, I was contracted as California Certified Studio Teacher under the US actor’s contract; it stipulated that a studio teacher be present and that the minor work and school under the same conditions as if he were working in California. This is sometimes done to protect even a non-California actor from the potential perils of filming in a region that doesn’t have protective child labor laws applying to the entertainment industry.
Taken on the beach in Australia while this interview was in progress!
Having worked on tours and as a distant-location teacher, how does having ever-shifting locations inform your work with students?
As long as my students’ shooting schedules and my responsibilities allow them, I avidly organize field learning of all kinds. If I’m working with only one student and the student has a day off from shooting, organizing a traditional museum day trip is relatively simple, especially in cities like New York or Chongqing that have convenient public transit (which may itself be part of the lesson!). Sometimes the student’s shooting schedule or my juggling of multiple students with different shooting and school schedules precludes a proper field trip, or my student may face significant “sit-down” academic demands combined with near-maximum work hours. Even in these cases, I bring the local setting to our school space by wording a math problem in terms of the local currency or distance between local landmarks, or by widening the discussion of setting in literature and bringing up extended contrasts of place and time that incorporate our location. Sometimes, even high school students under academic pressure will enjoy holding school at a local library or university for a change of scenery.
Once in a while, we hit the jackpot and find our shooting location to be in or adjacent to an ideal field trip location, such as the National Mall in DC. Once, in Salt Lake City, a portion of the Natural History Museum was dressed as a school entryway for our production, yet the rest of the museum was open to visitors. On that day, we split our school time between “desk work” and exploring the museum!
Prior to the pandemic, I held school on domestic flights and Amtrak several times; we made the most of the setting and view but had to tolerate the temporary loss of space and privacy. After schooling in a cold space (since the students couldn’t easily remove their helmets and coats) under a ski lift in Austria in 2019, it occurred to me that I was ready to work with students in outer space or on the Moon! Being the first studio teacher to work in outer space is now among my goals!
Kevin in Australia.
School at a bar in Chicago!
Another Chicago school room with a view.
View from a classroom in Austria (the students had the chance to tour the helicopter, which is a ski rescue ambulance!)
What is your favorite part about this work, and what is the biggest challenge you face while studio teaching?
My favorite part of this work is seeing a diverse (and usually mammoth) ensemble of crew and cast work together creatively and efficiently, in places familiar and unfamiliar, to produce cultural artifacts that will entertain and (maybe) educate many people. Working with different students and families and production crew around the US and the world is an amazing experience that would be hard to replicate in most other professional fields.
The biggest challenge? I think I share this with nearly everyone else on the cast and crew, but the knowledge that your current project is limited to weeks or months, or occasionally years, generates a sense of melancholy. Concurrent with and even while dedicating yourself to the project at hand, you often have to seek your next project and prepare to work in a completely different setting with a wholly different team. This sense is probably greater for the American cast and crew working on international projects, since our odds of reuniting on a future project are lessened compared to local crew.
Out of all of the exciting work you’ve done with OLE, is there one experience that stands out as the most memorable?
Only one? That would be a night at the Lincoln Memorial in June 2019. Our miniseries, set and shot in 1940 New Jersey, took a few days in Washington, DC to shoot the exteriors for an eventful family trip there. Park Police officers were helpful but strict in enforcing limits on the number of cast/crew who could be inside the chamber. Only the south chamber was to be used by our production, and the production was allowed only to request that visitors not cross to the south chamber or make significant noise. Though several hundred tourists were there from around the world, not one expressed any sentiment other than curiosity and fascination with our endeavor (the superb period costumes helped!). Everyone there, including our production, the tourists, and the Park Police, treaded softly on that hauntingly beautiful, hallowed space.
One of many marsupial sightings in Australia!
What are you up to now?
My last pre-pandemic project, a television drama shooting in Chicago for four months, wrapped on schedule on March 4th, 2020 amidst speculation that the mysterious virus might affect life in strange ways for a month or so. It happened that the Chicago production was the first one in the US with a known case of Covid-19 among the crew; fortunately, the virus did not spread among us. I visited my father’s home several hours away in Indiana and planned to stay there for a week or so before heading to Virginia for my next project. By March 13th, however, the Virginia project (and every other production) shut down, and I ended up spending seven months in Indiana until traveling to Australia in October to join a US television show that had completed 75% of filming before the shutdown. I was delighted to go to Australia, where I had not yet traveled and where Covid-19 had been more successfully contained. I spent the requisite two weeks in hotel quarantine in Sydney, holding school over Zoom, then went to Melbourne to work for six weeks. Upon wrapping, I hit the road as a rare (because borders were, and still are, tightly closed) foreign tourist. Later in January, I began a second project, an Australian production with an American high school student in the cast. The current project in Australia is focused on surfing; exactly two years ago I was in Austria for a film focused on skiing.
A feature of working several months at a time in each place is that I make myself a quasi-local and follow local news in each place, often for years. I end up on the email lists of public radio stations and newspapers, and on vegan life Facebook groups, in several different cities. I enjoy keeping up with friends and former colleagues in so many places!
Check back over the coming months as we speak with more industry professionals on how they’re adapting in these newly challenging times. We’re thrilled to be returning to work in film and television, and are eager for live theatre to reopen when it is safe to do so. For now, be sure to book Production Services through OLE, explore our Private Learning Offerings for your children, and keep following our Industry Updates page to stay current on what’s happening in entertainment and education.
We continue to wish you health and happiness during these difficult times.
-The team at On Location Education