My Magical Disneyland Engagement Photos

First off, I just need to say as a general disclaimer for anyone wanting to do this - taking engagement photos in Disneyland is not as magical as it seems. There were moments of pure magic, don't get me wrong, but there was also a lot of standing in weird positions, waiting for crowds to clear, very long hours in the summer sun, awkward staring and people blatantly taking our photos like we were celebrities. I could go on forever with the funny stories we have of things people said or would do, and I could also tell you the story of how our tour guide almost got in trouble because we took photos on the Mark Twain and (unknowingly) upset someone, ruining their experience.

But honestly, the best part of it all for me was the way some of the cast members went out of their way to be helpful if we just asked (or sometimes didn't ask at all). On the day we did Fantasyland, we went to the Fantasy Faire first thing since it tends to get very crowded in there. I really wanted photos in the Royal Theatre, but its always roped off when not in use. We found a cast member and asked them if we could get five minutes in there, so she sneaked us in. The pictures were absolutely beautiful, just like I imagined. Then we went to the Rapunzel tower statue and a different cast member, without us ever asking or even expecting it, started to hold people back between shots so we could get our photos more quickly.

And everything turned out so beautifully. I couldn't thank Brittany enough for going through this insane adventure of a week with us, especially after she got food poisoning on day one. It was long, and hard, but so very worth it.

Now for what you've really been waiting for....

 

 

 

  

 

To see the rest of the photos, go here.
Thank you so much for looking, and I hope you've enjoyed these as much as we do!

Inspiration, Imagination and a Touch of Insanity

I have to say, the most difficult thing to plan has been my tables. Being that my wedding is theme driven and not color driven, the creativity has to be present for it to work.

Take for instance the fact that I have two tables for each land: Main Street, Adventureland, New Orleans Square, Frontierland, Fantasyland, Toon Town and Tomorrowland. Then add in Critter Country as the buffet, and so on... Just deciding the tables which are worlds unto themselves takes creativity and a huge commitment, and the entire time, I've felt like I've been planning eight miniature weddings at once. I have truly felt stricken with ADD - I'd be looking at cute tea cups and kitschy napkins, and two minutes later, I'd be looking at bamboo runners and feathers!

The key to planning my wedding I have found has been immense amounts of organization. I had come up with ideas and jotted them down in my cell phone, had pinned a million ideas to Pinterest and created idea collages in my wedding planner - none of these actually worked. I was way too scattered! A year into my engagement, and it felt like I didn't really have anything planned. So over the course of about four weeks, I created a series of excel spreadsheets to cover everything from flowers, plates, cups, napkins, runners and lighting, and after I had the ideas written down, I created another spreadsheet to calculate the costs, and I've been marking them off as I go.

Today, my favorite tables are probably Main Street. They were my "final frontier", so they're still extremely fresh in my mind, but I started them by going to the Dollar Tree and seeing what I could find and referencing it back to my immense knowledge of the parks and reference photos to make sure I got it right. In this case, I really wanted the food parts of the land to be the most accurate - the others were more freely chosen in this instance - so I referenced back to my favorite "restaurant", the Refreshment Corner Cafe, and Gibson Girl, the ice cream parlor. Both (used to and somewhat still) have a 50's vibe, which I really really love. Mix that in with all of the stores having the old style marquee signs (which are so cheap and easy to find right now) and of course the Main Street Cinema (because it was all started with a mouse!) and presto - the whole table just fell into place.

Now, I won't give everything away because I'm really into the drama of it all, but here's a little bit of what to expect at that particular table, including their inspiration. Can your imagination put two and two together (or have I just gone insane)?

22 Hours and Counting...

In a mere 22 hours, I will be jet-setting off to Disneyland for my five day engagement photo shoot. Yes, I said five days (we're masochists). My beautiful photographer is my soon to be sister-in-law, and being that we're one big family of photographers, photography is extremely important to all of us (hence the masochism).

Now, under any normal circumstances, five days of engagement photos would be hard to plan for. To take it a step further, we decided to make them 50's themed because when we think of dressing nice, that's typically how we dress. However, I don't exactly have a whole closet full of 50's clothing, so we've spent the last seven months planning and collecting to ultimately execute this over-the-top endeavor. We hit up eBay, second hand stores and even Amazon to get all the pieces we needed. But this was the real challenge for me - coordinating all the outfits and deciding which days we should wear what.

The last month has been the most challenging for me. We met with his sister and with park maps in hand, we sat in Starbucks for two hours and created our "schedule of events". Now, I'm personally not one to schedule out my day, especially when it comes to Disneyland, but when you have so many things to hit on any given day, it takes a lot of coordinating to get it done.

So once we had the schedule decided, it was time for me to piece together all of our outfits. Initially I thought this would be simple, but I was at a complete loss. Not being able to have all of our clothes together at once to try them out, I resorted to my backbone- photography. We took photos of every possible article of clothing and I digitally rendered all of our outfits. There was revision after revision and even some slight bickering on if that vest would work with that outfit, but in the end, we both have agreed our outfits are perfect.

I've used these cheat sheets to insure we've packed everything, but it will also help us get dressed in the morning without frantically thinking "What tie was he supposed to wear?" And "I can't remember if today is the pin up/greaser look!"

But to take it all a step further, while we're annual passholders, his sister has only been to Disneyland once and its been about seven years since then. So to make everything easier on all of us, I used Pinterest, the best research tool on the internet, to compile a bunch of photos as reference to what we like and I grouped them by land.

 

I've ended up creating an almost "manual" of sorts for our engagement photos as a quick reference guide to get us through the week. Is it neurotic? Yes. Is it likely unnecessary? Probably. Do I regret it at all? No. This is what I've found helps me the most, and when it's the first and only thing I've genuinely stressed about at all when it comes to our engagement, I've found it oddly therapeutic.

Now to finish packing...

Stay tuned for photos!

P.S: Meet Andy, the tiny teddy. He'll be joining us on our adventures! It is a vacation for all of us, after all... #ayearwithandy (And don't forget to follow Brittany on Instagram!)

Don't worry, we're taking my suitcase too. #ayearwithandy #suitcases #packing #packingproblems #traveling

A photo posted by Brittany Murphy (@brittanykirstinphoto) on Aug 6, 2015 at 7:19pm PDT

The Honey Fund

I'm an avid Pinterest surfer - it's somewhat of an obsession. For better or for worse, I search through the wedding boards regularly to see other peoples ideas to hopefully glean some inspiration myself. My one rule I have for my wedding is to not make it look like it came right off of Pinterest. While those weddings are beautiful, they're a little overdone and just not me. With that in mind, of course some things just won't be truly unique - but at least I can put my own spin on them! So I give you the Honey Fund- the wonderful container used to store our spare change and cash that will be used towards the honeymoon.

This jewel was inspired by a pin on Pinterest, naturally, but I had my own technique of execution.
My fiancé works for Aaron Brothers, the art and framing store, so the frame we got was from there during their amazing penny sale. Since its a back loading frame, he had to carve the slot out of the top and then sand it down to make it "pretty".

My job was to make the words. My parents got me a Cricut craft cutting machine for Christmas, and since my mom has had many of them over the years, we have lots of the cartridges to choose from. The one I used was the Mickey font (since they don't have a Disney font cartridge and I haven't been daring enough to try the online stuff yet) and used a sticker vinyl to cut from.

(It's really hard to see the cuts, but they're there, promise!)

All that was left was to pick a picture, of which we tried a couple before making the decision. Since we plan on honeymooning at Disney World, it made since to use one of our photos from Disneyland. The one we decided on was from our engagement trip, but its possible that will change with our upcoming trip (or maybe the engagement photos we're planning on taking in a few months down the road.)

My BRIGHT idea

Tomorrowland has to be one of the biggest challenges I've been facing during the planning process - it's hard to be creative and futuristic without being cheesy and fake. Initially, I was going to go down this whole route of underwater lights and floating plants, but I really hated the idea. With no better ideas, I decided to shelve it and work on the other lands that were coming to me more easily. After almost six months, I've finally made a breakthrough I'm proud of - "wireless" light bulbs!

I was wandering through our local Hobby Lobby with my mom about a week before Christmas when I discovered their glass jar section, and subsequently located their glass light bulb jars. I immediately fell in love with them, but wasn't sure how I could possibly use them. When later trying to locate them online and trying to think of an idea of how to use them, I came across these small LED twist lights and knew exactly what I was going to do with them!

All it took was a little bit of creativity and some hot glue - and voila! You have "wireless" light bulbs!

Dreams Do Come True (My Disneyland Engagement)

On July 5, 2014, I got engaged at the Disneyland Resort. Call it stereotypical, call it cheesy - it was my long time dream-come-true. Quite frequently, people ask me why I love Disney and Disneyland so very much, and this is the perfect example to explain it.

Disney is a magical company where no matter your age, it's acceptable to act like an overexcited five-year-old, and not only do they allow it, they encourage it and embrace it. And while I certainly didn't feel five when I got engaged, Disney knew exactly how to make me feel special.

This is where I mention all the cast members involved in making this happen - yes, it is these people's jobs to make their customers feel special in order to encourage them to come back, but they go above and beyond. Take for example the above video - when I got engaged, we were on vacation, just the two of us. My parents knew he was proposing and it was killing them to not be there - but then an excited cast member who overheard the news that someone was about to propose as she was getting off work took the time to wait, watch and even record the whole event for us without us even knowing, and then tracked us down to make sure she could send it to us. My parents were ecstatic - it was the one way they were able to share in the moment too.

But how exactly did this amazing cast member find this out? My fiance asked a cast member if Mickey and Minnie would be out that night and explained to her why he was asking, so she went in the back to find out the schedule. Turns out, only Mickey was supposed to be out that night, but they wanted to make sure it was special so much so that the cast member who plays Minnie volunteered to get back in the suit unnecessarily. The super perk to this whole ordeal? The cast member photographer who took photos of the entire proposal.

The most amazing part of this was the cute photos we got to take afterwards as a stalling tactic - yes, we tried to leave and they wouldn't let us because they had a surprise for us. The cast member my fiance had talked to was from the hat shop on Main Street, who then went up the proper channels in order to give us bride and groom ear hats, of course from Mickey and Minnie.

If this was all there was to our Disneyland engagement, that would have been more than enough to satisfy for a lifetime; however, it doesn't stop there. Throughout the rest of our trip, we were showered with so many blessings from so many cast members. In case you didn't already know, Disneyland used to give out "Just Engaged" buttons - I say used to, because a couple of months before our engagement, they discontinued these buttons. What they still had at the time were "Just Married" and "I'm Celebrating", of which we were told the "Just Married" buttons were also on their way out of the parks - so we had a few cast members give us sets of those, as well as quite a few of the "I'm Celebrating" buttons.

And here's my favorite moment with any of the cast members. Just hours before we got engaged, we met and befriended a cast member while pin trading. She took a liking to us because we traded good pins - not the broken ones to be discarded. She had asked us to come back the next day as she wanted to look through the bin in the back for any good pins available for trade. When we came back, we were wearing our new awesome ear hats, and she got so overly excited, she made us special buttons to wear around the parks.

To top all of that off, she then decided to comp us the two brand new pins of Anna and Elsa from Frozen that had only been released the day before and were almost entirely out of stock in both parks. It was more than I ever expected, and I will cherish those pins forever as a sweet reminder of my wonderful engagement to my amazing and goofy fiance. 

So if all of this doesn't make you the slightest bit impressed with Disney and their entire "cast", I have no other experience that could possibly do the trick. My engagement was amazing, special, and will always bring a smile to my face - and I will always want to go back to Disneyland for more.