Hiking in movies

One of the things I love about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that while reading those books you can really *feel* how it is to travel. In particular you can feel how it is to travel by foot.
I have done some hiking myself and at least for me there is a special magic to exploring a landscape on your own two feet that is not evoked by any other form of travel. I'm not sure what it is - it includes moments like reaching the highest point of a pass and finally being able to see the valley on the other side, or looking back after an hour of walking and realizing the distance you made - but there is much more to it and I can't easily describe it in a few sentences.
Whatever it is, I think Tolkien managed to transport it quite well in his novels (actually it is said that Tolkien himself loved to make long walks through the English countryside). In Peter Jackson's movies on the other hand it is missing almost entirely. There is certainly no lack of trying - we see great panoramas of landscapes, helicopter flights through snow-covered mountains; we follow the heroes as they walk through brush, moorland, grassland, forest and all other kinds of temperate biome you could imagine. We see them walking, stumbling and climbing.
But still - at least for me this always looks like actors dropped in a scenic landscape (which it of course is) - that is, slightly soulless and artificial. I don't even think the movies are bad in general, I think given the economical constraints (mass appeal required to get back the gigantic investment) they are even close to a best-case scenario. But in this particular aspect they fail almost completely.
But now comes the funny thing. The other day I checked some video clips we made when we had been hiking in the Peak District with the kids the last time. Nothing special really - greyish weather, us, sheep, some hills. But there it was - even in these short amateurish clips, made with a cheap flip camera, I found the "spirit of hiking" was clearly recognizable!
Now, the really interesting thing to ask is of course, why is that so? The non-interesting answer would be that my personal experience (having been on that hike myself) colours my perception and that for everybody else the videos would be just as soulless as the mentioned movie scenes. This is perfectly possible of course, however I find it much more interesting to imagine that there is more to it than just that.
Here are a number of factors that I think might be responsible:

perfection

Pictures in Hollywood movies are perfect and glossy, my clips aren't. Perfection creates distance and a feeling of artificialness.

objective camera

In the movies we see the heroes stoically marching through New Zealand's Best Of. Since the heroes as well as said Best Of (and especially the combination of the two) cost a lot of money and supposedly are what the viewers want to see, the camera is quite busy putting them in the best light. Most of the time therefore we either see the landscape at a wide angle with the group of people somewhere in the middle or we see the latter from the front or the side passing the camera's position. That means we get an uninvolved (helicopter-equipped) spectator's view of what's going on, which is how we would experience a landscape when sitting in a car or a train (or a heli), but *not* how we experience it when walking through it.

speed

When a movie wants to show us that a car for instance is moving very fast, we usually see it approaching (very fast) to the camera's position (preferably at a turn), passing it and then moving away. The camera usually stays fixed at its position and only turns to keep the car in focus.
When filming people walking in contrast directors seem to think that walking per se is a far too boring activity to keep the viewer's attention. Therefore the camera compensates by moving around the person. Approaching it from the back, passing it, approaching it from the front, circling it, etc. This all makes for a busy picture however it does *not* convey the feeling of slowness that is defining for walking. I think essentially walking is usually shown as an activity while in reality it is more of a state.

So, after all this - what do we see in my clip? We see a slow pan of the (greyish, wet, sheep-dotted) landscape. Then a group of people overtakes the camera and slowly (in walking speed that is) moves downwards a small hill, climbs a fence gate and disappears down a path. As I said, really nothing special and more than anything proof of my utter lack of cinematographic ability. Still (for me) it perfectly transports the slowness and smallness of people moving through a landscape by foot.

Planet Shapes or The Bliss of Pointless Nerdy Hobbies

A couple of weeks ago I finally found a (tentative) solution for a problem that I have been mulling over since nearly 20 years. The stubbornness of this problem was only rivaled by its absolute pointlessness and obscurity. Let me elaborate.

RPG obsession

When I was 14 or 15 a friend of mine asked me an innocent question which turned out to have a huge impact on my life - he invited me to join his MERP group. I am not entirely sure whether I already had read Lord of the Rings at that time but I definitely had read the Hobbit, therefore although I totally did *not* get the concept of role playing games I was happy to give it a try.
This triggered an addiction-like fascination for role-playing games, Fantasy and Sci-Fi which only subsided years later. I spent countless hours reading F&SF novels (many of them crappy and most of them crappily translated) and playing MERP, Midgard, Warhammer and RoleMaster (sometimes three to four times a week). Luckily school in Germany usually ends at 13:00, therefore the amount of school hours I ended up sacrificing for my hobby were limited enough to let me get through school more or less successfully.

Reinventing

One peculiar thing about me being obsessed with something is that I usually very quickly begin to feel unsatisfied with the way things are. After a while I start to think 'this is really not good I could easily do this much better'. In many cases this is of course a blatant overestimation of my abilities (or an underestimation of the difficulty of the problem), but usually I end up spending many fun hours on some creative activity and I always learn a lot from it.
Anyways, in the case of the RPG obsession I of course immediately started wanting to design my own RPG system (I think I showed up at my third session of MERP with a new, "improved" character sheet, which was much more complicated and much less useful than the regular one) and my own fantasy world. Since starting small was never my thing this fantasy world of course had to have a complete history, its own biology, its own geology, ... you get the drift.
The problem

One problem I encountered early on was that I would have liked my hand-drawn maps to be an *exact* representation of my invented reality. I really hated the whole idea of having to live with a sub-optimal 2-dimensional projection of a 3-dimensional curved surface. There are some standard solutions to this problem - besides pragmatically accepting the imperfection of maps - such as ignoring it (usually done by fantasy authors), or assuming the world is a disk. However I wanted my world to be plausible with as little alterations to real-world physics as possible. I thought about many different solutions, from the dumb to the downright bizarre, but none of them was even close to satisfying. In the end I had to leave the problem unsolved.

The solution

Until three weeks ago, when I found this. After having believed for many years that the only way a planets shape can change with increasing angular momentum was to become an increasingly flatter oblate spheroid I learned to my utter astonishment that there are at least two other (slightly bizarre) possible shapes. Both of them would not solve my problem but greatly alleviate it. With a cigar-shaped planet the inaccuracies of the map are quite small (as long as you stay away from the ends of the cigar), but rotation speed and gravity should still occur in earth-like combinations. Outlandish but physically plausible - a great solution! Now I just have to find a way to actually calculate which combinations of rotation, density, mass and shape allow for earth-like conditions...

Parting words

As usual for me with these projects, after an initial time of furious activity my interest in my RPG world somewhat tapered off back then and the project never reached anything resembling completion (it reincarnated a while later as the setting for my own horribly complicated version of the board game Civilization). Luckily I am nowadays a bit wiser than when I was young and don't let myself be depressed by another unfinished project. I rather see fiddling around with one of them as an aimless entertaining activity which I pursue for its own sake not in order to produce something great.
And - as in this case - I usually learn something which is really obscure and pointless but fascinating.