About
Simon Pike is a multiple Emmy-nominated animation director with an accomplished professional history working primarily in animated series production.
His career spans 30 years working at every level of production in the international animation industry, starting in 1996 at the renowned stop-motion studio Aardman Animations before moving into 2D drawn and 3D animation studios across the UK and Ireland.
In 2016, he moved to Singapore to join One Animation, spending eight years as series director and then creative director on children's series, including the acclaimed international hits Oddbods and Sharkdog, working through every part of the process from premise and script development to design, direction, animation and final render.
Alongside this studio career, Simon has taught animation principles part-time at LASALLE College of the Arts for five years, mentoring students in Singapore and the UK.
He recently completed an MA in Arts Practice and Pedagogy there, adding formal grounding in pedagogy to three decades of studio experience. His teaching translates professional production technique into the classroom, with a focus on developing students' movement literacy and performance-led animation. He builds a professional workflow into every class, from day one.
Animating from Within: How do somatic and experiential pedagogical approaches develop movement literacy in undergraduate animation students, and how is this reflected in the quality and intentionality of their animated work?
Animation is a performance art, but its established pedagogy is based primarily on principles that teach physical movement through words and demonstration while assuming the learner already possesses the felt knowledge to translate that instruction into expressive animated movement.
In my experience, the current generation of animators is technically proficient, with screen-mediated methods carrying the bulk of their practice, and this further distances them from firsthand embodied knowledge.
This thesis asks how somatic and experiential pedagogy might develop movement literacy in undergraduate animation students through a pilot study programme.
To test this, I designed, delivered, and evaluated From Software to Self, a five-session embodied intervention programme run with a cohort of six undergraduate animation students.
The Animation Work Analysis Rubric (AWAR) is a central contribution of the study. It is an original, theoretically grounded instrument for detecting movement literacy in animated work. Using condition-masked review, it assesses the work across three distinct dimensions: technical competence, expressive performance, and embodied intentionality.
Two independent assessors tested it here, scoring students’ baseline and endline animation artefacts. Alongside the rubric, I evaluated the programme through reflexive thematic analysis across a range of complementary qualitative data streams, including student journals, debrief forms, and facilitator observations.
Two findings stand out. Students moved from simply executing generic movement toward feeling it and from copying reference toward reading it. A third result concerns the AWAR itself: where a student’s own self-report hit a ceiling, the AWAR still registered movement in the work that no other instrument in the study could detect.
The survey showed a cohort mean gain of 2.33 points on a 60-point scale, while the baseline and endline animation clips showed little visible change between them. Despite the apparent lack of progress, I view this as a genuine result, as that limited change was still registered at the AWAR’s dimensional level before it showed up in the animation. This suggests that the programme began to develop movement literacy in students, but that it was not fully visible in their work within the short runtime of the pilot programme.
The next step is to test the AWAR prototype with a larger cohort in a more expansive intervention programme and establish whether it holds up as a reliable instrument.
Professional practice
Regina Chua
Choi Jeong Won
Thomas Lim
Gaby Rae
Lai Juan-Xiang, Jesse
Paul Wong
