This time the wedding money-saving is more to do with adopting a smart strategy as early as possible.

The Frugal Panda has “50 Ways To Save Money On Your Wedding“.

Rich McIver wrote to point out that Credit Card Lowdown has just published 100 Creative Ways to Cut Wedding Costs.

YouTube has a Brides Magazine video about how to choose a hairdresser and how to wear your hair on your big day.

The Cool Tools blog talks about a new guide to making your own low-budget (action) movie on digital: The DV Rebel’s Guide. Below the blogpost are some example tips from the book. I paraphrase them and suggest that still photographers could learn from the following:

• Compared to a big studio you don’t have any money; but compared to them you do have a lot more time. Use it.
• Even if you do somethings unconventionally, you should be more than conventional about your punctuality.
• Ask before you get in people’s way.
• The DV Rebel’s Guide suggests that you can find dollys and cranes everywhere; I’d suggest that you can find tripods everywhere.

I watched 2006′s excellent high-school-meets-film-noir indie flick Brick recently again. On the DVD, the director talks about how the movie took six years to get off the ground. The turning point came when the director Rian Johnson got Ram Bergman on board as producer. He said the film could be done for half-a-million dollars instead of three million dollars and managed to do it for even less. The one thing Ram didn’t save money on was the stock. Everything was shot on 35mm film. As a result the final print looks far more expensive than it was. The friends and family of the director, cast, and crew who came up with the $450 000 to fund the production have already made the money back several times over.

If you are interested in seeing Brick then I recommend that you don’t read anything about it anywhere beforehand. Buy it on special offer on DVD at an offline Virgin megastore. I think my copy was £6.99. The commentary doesn’t contain not much in the way of advice on photography, but is interesting all the same. (And one of the cast members does a surprisingly accurate and amusing impression of the producer’s Israeli accent and picky eating habits over the final credits.)