BTTF 2 Wedding Invites & Costume Build

I've always had this wacky idea that if I ever got married, I would recreate the Back to the Future 2 movie poster and have the tagline say, "It's About Time". This is referencing the notion that I didn't follow the conventional path of getting married in my 20s. It seems that I met the right girl because my fiance, currently my wife, didn't hesitate to say yes. Woohoo! I ended up changing the title a bit to "It's Time to get Married" which I think is more appropriate. And the BTTF 2 poster inspiration is that these movies were very influential to my imagination as a child and are just plain fun to watch. I've created and collected props or artifacts from these movies, particularly the 2nd film. And the 2nd film offers 2 figures on the poster instead of just Marty, which made the decision clear to recreate BTTF2!

I have created many iterations of the Hover Board both as a prop and as a functional skateboard. The board didn't play much of a part in the invitation however but it's fun to note. I have also created the Marty Jr. jacket from the 2nd film. I thought at the time that it was one of my greatest prop builds. I even had a button that you could press and it would then have the message "Your jacket is now dried", so fun to do! So this jacket is featured in the invitation, Kimberly is wearing this.

I've also created the Nike Mags several times over the years, in various states of professionalism and screen accuracy. For the invitation, I was able to find a pair of Nike Mags online that although they were not complete, they were pretty stinkin close to the original and they had the lights for the side already built in. So I had to create the logos on the sides and the back, and I had to create a glowing NIKE symbol for the top/front of the shoe. Once that was all finished, the shoes were complete! And they look legit, if I don't mind saying so myself.

For the rest of the costume, Kim is wearing a standard issued 2015 blue jeans and a red shirt (per Marty's look).

I acquired a white wig (check) and I found the glasses that Doc Brown wears. These are opaque from the outside but are actually see through when you are wearing them (unlike the ones that were used in the filming, sorry Christopher Lloyd).

I was also able to find the shirt that he wears in the first sequence of the film, the red shirt with the black and white characters.

I then made a basic version of the Doc Brown shoes with red laces. If you watch the movie carefully, you will see that Doc has a lot going on with his shoes. These were details I chose to omit for the sake of the invitation and time.

I made the Doc Brown (under) pants twice; this was a challenge as I was not able to really get a good look at the pattern on his pants but after enough research, I found that it is essentially a blue giraffe print on black so that's what I went with. The first time around I painted blue on black and that pant became rigid and stiff, preventing me from even putting them on. The 2nd iteration was black ink (marker) on blue, which meant no layers of paint and this worked great!

I then made the top layer of his pants, the yellow pants, and I painted in the lines that represented the pleating design that is on Doc Brown's pants. I created Doc's plastic, transparent tie from a shower curtain (check), and then found a barber's smock which was just barely enough material to sew into the outer yellow jacket. That was a good test of my latent sewing skills and was a bit spooky that I had been looking everywhere for the type of shiny material, to then find the barber smock at a thrift store and it being just enough for the project, down to the inch, phew!

As for the poster themed invitation itself, I tried to be as accurate as possible to the poster, using the space intentionally and with a bit of charm and humor. This poster ideas was the A side; the B side was the logistics a little more directly, e.g. the date, time, location, as well as the registration. I used the Time Circuits as my muse for this aspect.

And for the ceremony invitations (these were separate), I couldn't decide between the Greys Sports Almanac, and the Flux Capacitor for my inspiration. So it was decided to do both, one design for each side, huzzah!