Justin Hackney

Justin Hackney is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Wonder Studios, an AI-native film studio that produces original content, brand campaigns, music videos, and documentaries using AI-augmented production workflows. He leads Wonder's creative direction and talent strategy.

Background in traditional filmmaking

Justin's first film set was Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), where he appeared as a child actor. Watching Boyle work redirected him from acting to production, and he spent the next fifteen years behind the camera.

Most of that time was at Mad Cow Films, where over ten years he worked his way through Brand Manager, Producer, Creative Director, and Director roles on campaigns for Honda, Lego, Jaguar, BT, Huawei, EE, Shelter, Credit Suisse, and Atlantic Records. The work spanned TVCs, experiential installations, and digital content, and he handled projects end-to-end; pitching, creative development, budgeting, producing, and directing.

He also set up Mad Cow Content (MCC), a division for high-volume digital work. By the time AI entered the picture, he had experienced every single angle of the production process.

OpenAI, Real Dreams, and ElevenLabs

Around late 2021, before ChatGPT's public release, OpenAI invited Justin and roughly twenty other artists to test DALL-E 2 and provide feedback to their engineering team. He quit his production job, invested personal savings, and launched Real Dreams - a global community of artists, creatives, and developers using AI and emerging technology.

Real Dreams started as in-person sessions in his living room with filmmakers, editors, photographers, fashion designers, and painters experimenting with early generative tools. Sessions ran until 3am. The events grew rapidly, running every other day for three months across Shoreditch in London, then expanding to the Bronx, Amsterdam, and other cities across three continents. Real Dreams hosts meetups, workshops, and free events, and also operates as a creative studio producing AI-driven content and experiences for brands and agencies.

Justin then joined ElevenLabs as Creative Director when the team was just twenty people. He directed all creative output across the company's core tools – text-to-speech, voice cloning, multilingual dubbing, and audio-to-audio – shaping the demos, campaigns, and launch materials that defined ElevenLabs' public identity during its breakout year.

He worked closely with product, engineering, and research to translate technical capabilities into cinematic storytelling, and launched global creative initiatives and competitions that gave filmmakers, game developers, and experimental artists access to generative AI tools. The company scaled to over 160 employees and became the leading AI voice platform.

Founding Wonder Studios

Justin founded Wonder Studios with Xavier Collins in 2025, building on the Real Dreams community with a studio infrastructure behind it. Wonder raised $3.25M+ in pre-seed funding from LocalGlobe and Blackbird, followed by a $12 million seed round led by Atomico in October 2025, with backing from Adobe Ventures and angel investors from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and ElevenLabs.

Under Justin's creative leadership, Wonder has produced the Beyond the Loop anthology series (with ElevenLabs, Freepik, Fal, and Kling AI), a music video for Lewis Capaldi's "Something in the Heavens" (with DeepMind, YouTube, and Universal Music Group), a documentary with Campfire Studios, and co-hosted global AI film festivals. Creative partnerships span Runway, OpenAI, Pika, Luma, and ThinkDiffusion. The studio operates on a 50/50 ownership model where creators retain half the IP in their projects.

Speaking and public appearances

Justin's public talks and podcast appearances include:

• Upscale Conf 2025, Malaga - keynote on "the Renaissance of Meaning" in AI filmmaking

• India AI Film Festival 2026, Delhi (Qutub Minar) - interview on AI as "the biggest unlock for creativity we've ever experienced as a species"

• Chroma Awards London - panel on taste, tools, and the AI filmmaking community, co-hosted with ElevenLabs

• Lighthouse Academy podcast (November 2025) - long-form interview covering Real Dreams, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Wonder's production model

Perspective

Justin believes this current moment in AI as a cultural renaissance.

His position is that AI tools expand what skilled filmmakers can produce, and that craft and taste still determine quality. He founded Wonder to connect the technology companies building the tools and the established industry that needs to understand them.

"I follow curiosity. That is my drive."