Frédéric, Misun, and the boys are mov­ing to France to explore a new busi­ness ven­ture. To say good­bye to every­one, they rent­ed out a karaoke bar and had a par­ty. The night was a cacoph­o­ny of sound, for the kids were giv­en free reign of the dance floor and ran around in cir­cles, while the adults took turns singing and eat­ing.

This is my first “5x5”; a video of five vignettes at five sec­onds each. It’s a help­ful guide­line for putting togeth­er footage that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have a con­sis­tent theme. It’s also very restric­tive, as five sec­onds is bare­ly enough to see what’s going on in a par­tic­u­lar clip, and that means you real­ly have to find the essence of action. I gen­er­al­ly don’t make 5x5s because I always have a sto­ry to tell, but in this case, it’s fun just to see how peo­ple sing. This is very dif­fer­ent from the Chinese karaoke par­ties I was wit­ness to as a kid, where the adults take their singing very seri­ous­ly, so every­one is very qui­et, atten­tive, and quite rehearsed.

The one who stole the show was Akio, who had heard Frédéric, Misun start­ing a duet of Ne Me Quitte Pas, took the micro­phone from Misun, and start­ed repeat­ing the line he had just learned.

I told Frédéric, “It’s amaz­ing that you’re not ner­vous up there”, and he told me, “I just said to myself that I want to have fun, and it would­n’t be fun if I did­n’t sing, so I was­n’t ner­vous.” I wish I could do that.