Mykim Dang
Full Stack Digital Creator / Executive Video Producer
Boulder, CO
thisismykimdang.com
instagram @mykimdang
twitter / linkedin
Q What do you do?
“Hi, I’m Mykim and I’m a full stack creator who works across mediums.”
I craft short films, original series, digital strategies and am constantly exploring the limits of visual formats.
A classically trained filmmaker who fell into digital by accident with the advent of platforms like Vimeo and YouTube, I’ve had the honor of creating original content across platforms for the past 15 years, helping makers and their respective audiences connect and learn along the way. From being a founding member of the Mobile Video Lab at Meta, where I pioneered vertical video formats, to leading the original video operation at food media brand America’s Test Kitchen, growing their audience from 300K to over 1.3M across social, I have a deep respect and understanding of how the container shapes the creative. I am a bridge and translator between creative output and business impact, using data and insights to drive craft and programming, all while keeping my feet on the ground as a creator myself.
My first entrepreneurial venture, a custom made, skateboard design company was forged with my life long friend at the age of 17. When I’m not making, you can find me exploring digital privacy, surfing and free diving. I have an unwavering commitment to ensuring that as technology becomes more integrated into every part of our existence, creativity and genuine analog connection continues to have a place in our hearts and minds.
Q What steps did you take to get to where you are now?
The story of my creative career couldn’t be told without the context of my culture and upbringing. As the daughter of Vietnamese War refugees, I grew up constantly moving, adapting and attempting to assimilate. I found solace in books, pen and paper. Fine art was my first love and a survival mechanism in many ways, but at the time my family was unsupportive and unable to understand how I could build a life based on creative pursuits. At 14 I picked up my first DVC video camera and found a new way to see and move through the world. I began to focus on filmmaking and decided to pursue it formally in college, still much to the confusion of my family. I worked extremely hard in those early years, which paid off as I was able to attend college on a scholarship despite the tension that existed around me. It was an incredibly stimulating and expansive environment, but even during my time there, I still felt like I didn’t really belong.
At the end of my college career, while most of my peers pursued defined film industry or commercial paths moving to LA or NYC, I ended up staying in Boston, landing my first full time job as an office assistant at PBS working on the science documentary show NOVA. It was during that time I started to learn more about these platforms called YouTube and Vimeo, which marked another significant turning point in my life and career. As someone who thrived when making things, the idea that you could do just that and put it out there for anyone in the world to experience, without traditional barriers like a distributor or studio, filled me with so much excitement and hope.
I made the decision to dive head first into digital video production and landed a gig in-house at a startup called Brightcove that was building the distribution technology to support this ongoing wave of online video. I cut my teeth in that environment, starting in product as a scrum master and quickly transitioning to build out the video and marketing operation, creating content from producing, shooting and editing to traveling globally to manage and live stream events. After the company went public, I spent the next 3 years of my career in the startup space, helping companies produce content and embrace the ever growing wave of video.
In 2014 I made the leap to creating video content full time and started my own production company. It was an incredible period of creativity and variety. I learned so much and made many mistakes throughout that journey. The next plot twist in my career came in 2017 when I began exploring the potential of short form and vertical video with the explosion of mobile. I was turned on to a job opportunity at Meta by a former colleague from Brightcove and ended up joining the company as a video editor on a team called the Video Lab. My foray into the world and culture of big tech was fast, furious and tenuous - but also incredibly creatively rewarding. The work that I produced during this pushed me to new limits and solidified my understanding that where and how the content you make is consumed, is equally important as the content itself.
I always struggled to find a sense of true belonging in these environments. As a maker who’s values were embedded in the desire to create impact and depth over scale, creating within the culture and confines of tech left me with more questions than answers. In an attempt to find answers to these questions, I took another detour in my career and went to work in food media for a heritage brand called America’s Test Kitchen. In this role, I was tasked with building an original digital video operation and programming from the ground up. I had the honor of working alongside some of the most passionate and talented people in the space transforming a brand that had a fledgling presence on digital into a go to destination for inspiring creativity in the kitchen with original content.
3 years later after some stops, starts and the pandemic, I had reached another crossroads and was ready to move on from food media to explore video formats through a new lens again. I received the opportunity to join a subsidiary company of IMDB and Amazon called Digital Photography Review to grow their original and social programming and manage a branded content program focused on working with creators in the tech space. While I was hesitant to re enter that environment, the chance to reframe another established brand and dive head first into a new video ecosystem tipped the scales for me. In this most recent chapter of my career, I’ve continued to be a bridge between left brain and right brain, championing the creator experience while establishing new video formats that combine commerce and narrative.
My story continues to evolve - but the common thread throughout is made of adaptation and curiosity. I’m grateful for the people and places I have worked with and learned from and am guided by a desire to never stop learning.
Q How do you stand out in your field?
My ability to identify and create connections among seemingly disparate information, experiences and people, is something I don’t take for granted. I’ve made it a point throughout my career to never get too far away from the work of creating itself, which allows me to truly understand the scope and scale of the things that I am being tasked with, ensuring that everyone involved is treated with respect and empathy. As someone who has chosen to make a living off their creativity, I understand the relationship between these choices, my identity and my ability to perform. I am constantly looking in between the lines and to unexpected places for insight and inspiration. I am meticulous and can dive deep while also keeping an open mind and allowing for flexibility and iteration, making for a unique combination of execution, strategy and sustainable impact in every project I take on.
Q What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on a mixed media project I’m calling “Slide Dreams” that combines the last 5 years of my dream diary which I’ve recorded via audio with found 35mm slides. I combine the audio records with randomly projected slides which I then package into video. I’ve used the idea of exquisite corpse as part of my creative practice in many forms over the years from words to illustration, but I’ve been employing it here as a way to explore the strangeness and serendipity of my dreams.
Another project I’m working on is focused on helping more people connect with the real world and nature in their everyday lives. I’ve been documenting my natural environment when hiking, mountain biking or swimming with a magnifying glass and cataloging the clips into a video library. I’m extremely passionate about encouraging people to tap into this aspect of their lives, especially given the point in time and society we currently find ourselves in.
The last project that is in motion is a blog about the creator economy. I’ve spent the last year formally interviewing creators from all walks of life and across industries and hope to share these stories to help creators and audiences alike understand the opportunities and risks in the space.
Q What’s your style?
I would describe my POV as ever evolving but heavily influenced by nature, analog media and grounded in the idea of opposition - whether that be light and dark, good and evil, creation and destruction etc. Some of my most significant creative influences are Alexander McQueen (who also drew inspiration from history, nature and film to create work that was extremely layered, complex and unique) as well as Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion, the founders of Blue Note Records (they created a label that defined both the sound and visual style of Jazz making an indelible mark on culture). I also grew up on a diet of David Fincher and still consider him to be one of the greatest and most meticulous and prolific shapers of film and media today.
Q Out of all your slashies, which one do you wish you could do more often?
I’d love to spend more time working in post and editing. Oftentimes, since I am responsible for every aspect of the work I take on, I naturally have to delegate my time across the entire production or project lifecycle, but I really thrive when I can go deep and take countless inputs, bring them together, break them apart and shape something entirely new.
Q What is frustrating you right now?
I continue to feel exhausted by dealing with the management side of my business, whether that be taxes, forecasting and making sure that things like insurance and retirement savings are in order. I am sure this is a frustration that never gets old for us creatives but I will say that there are now more resources than ever (ilovecreatives, catch, freelancers union etc) that make it easier and feel less alone in these necessary details.
Q If you could hire someone for $20/hour, what would you have them do to make your day easier?
Help me stay informed and inspired by curating the constant deluge of content that is available. While there are some amazing substacks, podcasts and discords I have access to, I don’t always have time (or energy) to consume and participate. With the speed of information moving at its current pace, you can easily miss a creative opportunity or insight to help guide an idea and there just aren’t enough hours in the day compared to an internet minute.
Q What do you wish you could have told yourself, when, and why?
I would tell those many versions of myself when I faced so much resistance from my own family and culture, to the majority cultures and environments I found myself in throughout my life, that it’s beautiful to be different and that I didn’t have to put everyone else before myself. It wasn’t until very recently that I started to learn this lesson and began to give myself permission to embrace what makes me who I am instead of trying to cater to everyone and everything else around me to find acceptance and peace.
Q If you could talk to an expert to gain more insight on something, what would it be about?
I’d really enjoy learning from an AI ethicist or ML engineer. I’ve just started exploring the possibilities of AI generated images, text and audio within my own creative practice and I’d love to learn more about the information architecture of how the AI classifies, sorts and makes decisions from a set of data to create an output.
Q What kind of opportunities/projects are you looking for?
I light up when given the opportunity to help values based folks and brands tell their story through video and across platforms. I’m open to everything from crafting the strategic direction/research for that content to shooting and editing video for multiple formats and platforms (both organic and paid) as well as producing original (ideally episodic) video content.
Q Describe your ideal job/client/collaboration.
The ideal collaborator is an individual or group that is driven by shared values. For me that means open to creating work together where there is trust in my experience and expertise as well as clarity on the goal we are seeking to achieve. The most successful projects and products I’ve worked on have had the right mix of these factors. Established briefs, budgets and audience/customer definition are also wonderful to have defined at the outset of any engagement when possible - and where not, alignment in the process of identifying them thoughtfully to set us all up for the best outcomes.
Q What is your rate?
Because I offer a multitude of services across creative strategy and production I prefer to work on day and project rates. Depending on the scope and scale of any given project here are some examples to help give you an idea of the range:
Post production: $1200 per day
Creative Strategy: $1500 per day
Production: $1500-$3000 per day (highly dependent on final gear/crew needs etc)
Distribution strategy (includes channel optimization, organic and paid media planning etc) $1200 per day
Q How should someone approach you about working together?
Email is my preferred form of communication and the easiest way to connect. Having worked on the inside of the tech industry, I have a very cautious relationship with social platforms and am very intentional about how and when I engage with them (don’t ask me the last time I checked my Twitter or LinkedIn DMs for example). Once we have a chance to make contact, I love getting to chat live, either over a call or VC to learn more about what you’re looking to do and how I might be able to help. It will be most effective if you are able to come ready with the framework of a scope, including items like what kind of audience you are trying to reach, on which platforms and ballpark target timelines and budgets.
Q Who is a creative you admire?
taylorslyder.com - incredible designer and human, worked on some of the most impactful and interesting DTC brands
nasirfleming.com - out of this world talented content creator and social strategist
vitofilms.co - amazing cinematographer and long time collaborator
Q Oh! and… how do you stay creative?
Connect with nature and loved ones.
This member profile was originally published in December 2022.