10 - 11 April 2025
Location: School of Digital Arts
Event Type: In-person and Virtual
SODA and POC in Play invite you to attend the first international diverse games festival in person in Manchester Metropolitan’s School of Digital Arts.
In SODA’s state of the art new building we will host two days of talks and a networking event showcasing diverse speakers and topics across games development as well as animation and film. This builds on POC in Play’s popular series of networking events with a premium roster of global talent to learn from and connect with.
Speakers
Shifally Rattan
Shifally Rattan brings a decade of experience in the gaming industry, currently serving as a Senior Character Artist at Infinity Ward. You can see her work in Call of Duty: MWII – Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. Earlier in her career, she worked as a Character Artist at Respawn Entertainment, contributing to titles like Star Wars: Jedi-Fallen Order and Jedi-Survivor. She also held positions as a Character Artist and Outsourcing Character Art at The Coalition, where she worked on Gears of War 4 and Gears 5. Shifally now lives in Los Angeles, California.
Harvey Newman
Harvey Newman is a seasoned Game Director and Animation Specialist with over 20 years of experience in the video game industry. He has contributed to notable titles such as “Battlefield V” and “Horizon Zero Dawn.” As the founder of Proxima Studio and Animworks Ltd, Harvey leads teams in creating immersive gaming experiences. He also offers consultancy services, focusing on animation direction, pipeline optimization, and motion capture execution. Beyond his professional endeavours, Harvey is dedicated to mentoring aspiring animators through his YouTube channel and educational courses, sharing his extensive industry knowledge to inspire and guide the next generation of game developers.
Helen Kaur
Helen Kaur is the UI Art Director at Hundred Star Games. She has previously worked as the Lead UI Artist at Rocksteady Games on ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’, and as a Senior/Lead UI Artist at Ubisoft, where she shipped ‘Trials of the Blood Dragon’ and ‘Trials Fusion’. Helen’s expertise has earned her recognition as a BAFTA Game Awards Juror for the Multiplayer category in both 2020 and 2023. In 2020, she was also shortlisted for the Women in Games Awards in the Creative Impact of the Year category. Originally from Singapore, Helen spent 12 years in Helsinki before relocating to London.
Professor Stuart Sumida
Dr Stuart Sumida is a palaeontologist with the California State University San Bernardino who has published three books and over 70 journal articles, specializing in the biological transformations that took place as back-boned animals adapted to life on land. Sumida’s dedication to teaching has garnered a number of honours, including CSUSB’s Golden Apple Award; CSUSB Outstanding Professor; the prestigious California State University Wang Family Excellence Award; and California Professor of the Year, awarded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He is a frequent anatomical consultant to the entertainment industry, working on more than 60 feature-length motion pictures, including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Lilo and Stitch, the first and last Harry Potter films the How to Train Your Dragon series for DreamWorks, Life of Pi, Ratatouille for Pixar, and many more. He also served as a consultant to animators to video games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, Disney’s academy-award winning Zootopia, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, and DreamWorks’ Abominable. He was elected president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the largest professional organization of palaeontologists in the world.
Freddie Babord
Freddie Babord is the CTO of Radical Forge and Lead Coder on Southfield. He has a passion for tools programming to accelerate workflows and empower teams to be the best selves they can be. In addition to building the Blockout Tools Plugin for the Unity Engine, Freddie founded Radical Forge in Middlesbrough from 2 employees to over 40 with all of the IT infrastructure that comes along with that. Freddie has recently moved to Manchester.
Dr Darshana Jayemanne
Darshana Jayemanne is Reader in Digital Cultures and the author of “Performativity in Art, Literature and Videogames”. He lectures in Art, Media and Games at Abertay University. Previously he was a researcher at The University of Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in venues such as Fibreculture, ToDiGRA Journal and The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He served as a jurist on the Independent Games Festival’s Award for Narrative Excellence, and was Principal Investigator on a report on loot boxes for the UK Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. Currently, he is Co-Investigator for the CoSTAR National Laboratory and the GAME-ER Horizon Europe research project.