Iceland - 48 Miles of Laugavegur & Fimmvörðuháls Trails

In August 2023 I hiked the Laugavegur Trail with two of my friends, Iñaki and Thiabult (who joined me on my Tour du Mont Blanc hike in 2022). Afterwards, I hiked the Fimmvörðuháls trail solo as a continuation from Thorsmork to Skogar. It was my first time hiking in Iceland, and it was such a great experience, I'm sure I'm going to do it again at some point.

I shot this video using my A7iii with Tamron 28-200mm lens using HLG3, my GoPro 11 in Flat color with Labs Firmware adjusting the noise reduction to 0, and I gave Iñaki my GoPro 6, also in flat Color. The GoPro was stabilized using a combination of Reelsteady or Gyroflow, depending on the footage. I edited and color graded everything in DaVinci Resolve Studio 18.6. This was an extremely challenging video for me to color grade since the landscape was so colorful.

I also shot a few clips in CinemaDNG on my phone using MotionCam, a first for me on a big trail. It worked perfectly and the gyro data allowed me to smooth everything out in Gyroflow. The shots in the Blue Lagoon were all done on just my phone and the quality is amazing considering what usual smartphone video looks like.

The maps of Iceland were created using Blender 3.8 and a combination of tools. For heightmap data, I used the BlenderGIS plugin and https://tangrams.github.io/heightmapper/ to generate the displacement textures needed for the entire island. To get satellite data, I also used the BlenderGIS plugin, but mostly relied on SASPlanet to download sections. This was my first video using multiple resolutions of terrain in each video. The wide ocean is low detail, the trail region is medium detail, and the areas where the camera zooms in the most - such as hut locations - are extremely detailed. I used Z18/Z19 levels for these shots, and overlaid the resulting image planes onto the larger map of the trail using a shrinkwrap/solidify modifier to smoothly transition from the medium to high resolution imagery. This part of the video always takes the longest, I spent perhaps a month and a half wrestling with Blender trying to get the terrain all set up, and perhaps 2-3 weeks in Davinci Resolve cutting the video together. For a more detailed look of this process, I made a video covering this when I hiked the Collegiate loop (   • Collegiate Loop Mountain Range in Blender  ). That mountain rage was my first attempt at doing this, I've evolved my process a lot since then and the quality improvement from the Collegiate to Iceland is substantial.

Songs Used:
Odal - Wardruna
Human - Of Monsters and Men
Gudernes Vilje - Myrkur
Seven League Boots - Zoe Keating
Norðrljós - Skáld
Solringen - Wardruna
Cleared of All Charges - Alexandre Desplat
Warm Foothills - Alt-J
Ahay - Of Monsters and Men

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - Reykjavik
01:55 - Day 1
05:17 - Day 2
09:54 - Day 3
17:41 - Day 4
27:20 - Exploration