Portfolio · Selected Work 1998 — 2026
Twenty-five years across filmmaking, computer vision, augmented reality and real-time graphics — from celluloid cutting rooms to Gaussian Splatting on an iPhone.
Santa Monica, California · dep.monaghan@gmail.com
An iOS-first 3D Gaussian Splatting social platform — capture a moment in three dimensions, then share and re-live it from any angle. Designed, built and shipped in a ten-month cycle: SwiftUI and Metal, on-device 3D reconstruction, and GPU-optimised splat rendering tuned for mobile hardware.
A real-time cinematic previs studio on iPhone and iPad. Viz Pro works like a camera, not a 3D program: walk the set, frame shots, switch lenses and pull focus with real-world scale and physics — with Pixar OpenUSD scene editing under the hood for production pipelines.
Demonstrated to hundreds of Disney employees at Disney Studios Burbank's internal technology showcase, and used in episodic television production including Chucky (seasons 1–2). Developed with support from Emmy-winning cinematographer Christopher Soos, director Jeff Renfroe and Cream Productions, with 100,000+ sessions logged through the App Store ecosystem.
Computer vision for automated baseball strike-zone analysis: mount an iPhone behind the plate and every pitch is called, tracked and logged in real time. Built camera capture and video-processing pipelines and strike-detection algorithms in Swift; named contributor on a computer vision patent arising from the work.
A comprehensive photogrammetry scan of New Zealand Parliament's historic Debating Chamber — Nikon D750 with cross-polarised flash for reflective surfaces, Leica BLK360 LiDAR for architectural precision, and DJI drone flights indoors among the chandeliers, over multiple nights under government security protocols.
The resulting digital twin was published on Steam as the New Zealand Virtual Debating Chamber — a free VR experience opening one of the country's most iconic civic spaces to the public.
Research at the intersection of photogrammetry and machine learning. Architected DeepPBR, an ML tool for procedural PBR texture synthesis from photogrammetry data — backed by $100,000 of NVIDIA compute credits through the Inception Programme and a USD 250,000 Epic MegaGrant. Heritage digitisation spanned the Treaty of Waitangi, NZ Parliament and CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and a 10-projector Unreal nDisplay passive-VR installation was deployed at EPFL, Switzerland.
Interactive theatrical AR/VR: Black Madonna, a Magic Leap theatre experience, and real-time tsunami and terrain simulations built in Unreal Engine for Te Taiao Nature, Te Papa Tongarewa's permanent natural-environment exhibition.
The studio behind the experiments: a vehicle for spatial-computing, graphics and photogrammetry R&D that has produced ServerSFM (a distributed Structure-from-Motion pipeline built on open-source tooling), DotSwarm, Flotogram, Take Sixty, 3D Vue, and a decade of ARKit and Metal prototypes pushing what a phone can render.
One of the first augmented-reality apps in the App Store, launched alongside ARKit itself. Flotogram pins photographs in mid-air where you took them, filling real space with floating memories — movement record, panorama and video modes turn a walk into a living slideshow. Covered by WIRED, Gizmodo and UploadVR, and still live in the App Store nearly a decade on.
The world's first narrative film set entirely in a point-cloud world — a cinematic space built from millions of photogrammetry points. Funded by NZ On Air and the New Zealand Film Commission, it fused treadmill-shot live action with scanned environments from abandoned buildings and landmarks, rendered at 8K–16K through DotSwarm, a custom GPU point-cloud engine built for the production. Over 15,000 hand-animated frames, an AWS render farm, and open-source photogrammetry repurposed for storytelling years before it was common.
A behavioural safety system that beats complacency by constantly changing — modular gates at rail crossings re-arranged daily so pedestrians never stop noticing them. Shot on Blackmagic cinema cameras, long-lens DSLRs, GoPros and camera towers; cut to track the psychology of attention itself. It became the centrepiece of a national safety campaign.
In-house creative inside one of the world's most awarded agency networks. Campaign editing, motion design and cinematography for NZTA, KiwiRail, ACC, IRD, Education NZ, NZ Police and the Ministry of Social Development — including the agency's award-show submissions, the craft behind Cannes Lions, D&AD, Clio and Axis wins.
A full-service production company run from a 1905 railway station we personally restored — a Rail Heritage Trust Award in 2005, and freight trains rumbling past on both sides of the edit suite. From it came Heineken "Open," shot on 35mm in Barcelona for Saatchi & Saatchi, and the Yellow Pages Treehouse — six months of production across 35mm, HD and star-lapse, filming the real construction of a restaurant in a redwood tree.
Trained in the last years of celluloid: assistant editor on Vertical Limit and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted; editor of Little Gold Cowboy (Venice Biennale); music videos for Brooke Fraser, The Brunettes (MTV Europe nomination) and King Kapisi. Later, digital imaging technician and video-split operator on Spartacus and Power Rangers — called the best on-set compositor he'd ever worked with by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Bill Pope.
