When Dom Hodgson proposed to his girlfriend Heather, a rigged movie screening, a moon bounce, and her entire extended family were involved.
Hodgson is going to make sure her wedding is just as wild.
The U.K. entrepreneur and developer launched Don’t Tweet The Bride, a crowdfunding site to help him pay for and plan the couple’s wedding as a complete surprise to Heather. In return for a small donation, he plans to release the entire escapade as a documentary.
“I have no film crew, no editing skills but I have 12 months, a small budget and a bride who would rather I just surprise her,” Hodgson wrote.
According to Hodgson, all Heather knows is that her fiancé is going to take control of planning the wedding. But since he has a history of crazy stunts, she may suspect something is up:
“Now I’m not going to lie, I have a habit of doing things a little differently, I run a web conference twice a year and we’ve done things like: brought a bouncy castle into a casino and filled it with ball pool balls, hired an 18 hole crazy golf course and put it inside a hotel, opened a sweet shop without telling Heather (well actually I did tell her but she said no so I waited till she went away for the weekend).”
Just to make sure the bride doesn’t suspect a thing, Hodgson said he’s planning two weddings—a traditional Friday wedding in North Wales, and an unconventional mystery wedding the following day in Leeds.
Strangers who choose to submit a donation to Hodgson’s project will obtain access to a members-only section of the site and be able to view protected tweets from his Twitter account, @dttbride.
On the Don’t Tweet The Bride page, Hodgson answers questions like, “Isn’t this just an elaborate way of getting me to pay for your wedding…?” but asks contributors to instead see their money as going toward a “worthy cause.”
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say yes,” he wrote. “I thought it was a pretty fun way of raising some money for the wedding that wouldn’t commercialise the big day, I’ll still be videoing what happens with the organising no matter what.”
Photo by Martin Cunningham