Australia’s John Farnham “The Last Time”

For 35 years John Farnham has been at the pinnacle of the Australian entertainment industry. John embarked on the most significant concert tour ever undertaken by an Australian artist when he commenced his farewell tour in Melbourne last November. Titled "The Last Time", John and the Farnham Band toured all major capital cities and 23 regional centers across Australia.

For such a high-profile tour, only the most sophisticated lighting tools would suffice, including some 50 Martin MAC 2000s and the Martin ShowDesigner (MSD), an easy to use software tool that allows LD’s to develop lighting designs in vivid 3-D computer graphics.

Martin ShowDesigner
Lighting Designer Chris Newman and Moving Light Operator Peter Lothian used the Martin ShowDesigner for the first time to pre-plot the lighting of the show.

"I´m happy with the results, it handled a lot of instruments" stated Chris. "I have used WYSIWYG previously but did find some of the features in MSD - such as seeing the actual movement of fixture heads and the real-time display - much better than previous versions of WSYIWYG."

Time and money savings
Chris and Pete are convinced that Martin ShowDesigner saved them at least three days of rehearsal time. When you add up production hire, venue costs and crew wages for those three days - that´s a saving of thousands of dollars.

"It´s definitely the way of the future," said Pete. "MSD´s Offline Visualizer was fantastic to use, and we were impressed by the quality and accuracy of the program. Any changes to the rig were also very easy to do, showing fixtures, rigging and the set."

John has performed to in excess of 3 million fans at his concerts, and concludes his touring years still holding every attendance record in the country. Following the arena shows, he will tour regional Australia in a circus tent and, although the production will be scaled down in size, Martin MAC 2000s will still be lighting the way.