In the book, Maria does quite a bit of riding on Perrywinkle. We also see Sir Benjamin on Atlas a few times, and Loveday does ride Perrywinkle at one point. Not to mention the driving horses, and the horses of the sea. And the Little White Horse himself, of course.
The books has *mostly* gentle riding, it seems to me, no leaping over logs or fences or galloping over rough terrain.
Which leads me to wonder about the riding seen in the film (assuming we will see riding in the film, and I hope we do): Will there be riding doubles or will we perhaps see the actors themselves riding? And that sort of thing...
Lucky actors. Did you see some of the gorgeous horses used in Lord of the Rings. The beautiful grey ridden by Gandalf (I think Shadowflax was his character name !!!!). He looked a bit like an Andalusian to me.
On the LOTR DVDs there are some clips of Viggo Mortensen just riding around on one of the stunning horses in his spare time between filming ..... sigh. Would have paid to work on the movie !!!!!
Shadowflax was an Andalusian .... yeah, good guess on my part. Did you know that they put fake manes, tails and even feathers (and make up) on the film horses sometimes.
I think a Haflinger was used for the hobbit pony, wasn't it ???
Well in some films, like The Lord of the Rings, the principal actors that had a lot of on-screen riding (ie. Karl Urban as Éomer, Bernard Hill as King Theoden, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, etc.) had riding lessons, and they were able to do the majority of their riding work.
However, in many films riding doubles are used. Going to the Lord of the Rings examples, as many people have seen those films, Liv Tyler had Jane Abbott as a riding double for many scenes (ie. the chase to the Ford), as did Ian McKellan as Gandalf, mainly because of the nature of the riding they had to do, which involved quite a bit galloping and stuntwork.
Jane Abbott is an eventer from NZ. She now works with a company called New Zealand Movie Horses, and they do performances and stuff. But she did the work for those chase scenes. The close-ups were done with a barrel-rig horse.
Actually, Bill the Pony was played by two horses, Shane, a quarter horse, and Rastus, a Shetland pony. You know those scenes in the mountains? Well...those were actually done by a panto-pony, meaning that it was two people in a horse suit. Sounds funny, I know, but the terrain was very rough and they couldn't get the ponies up.
One scene I would love to do is falling off Periwinkle! If they make it really fun it could be really fun to act out! OWWW! I fell off Periwinkle! Next time I fall of a horse I'm going to say that! My instructor will be like 'WHAT!?'
You have to be sooo careful though. I just slipped off a horse once when I was riding bareback, I didn't go flying through the air and we weren't even going fast, but I broke my hand anyway.
Ow! But they could do a scene where Maria hops onto Periwinkle and falls off the other side because she doesn't hold on properly and she falls onto a mat! That would be fun but Periwinkle would have to be trained well!