I have a story in mind that I would like to put onto paper. However, this story takes place in a world vastly different to ours with complex wildlife. Think about the movie Avatar, something among those lines. The scenes I would like to get across to my readers are very visual.
Now when I think about the scenes in my head it paints a pretty clear picture, but I am having a hard time describing it in a way that readers get a similar picture. I feel as if I just need way too much words to give my readers a good idea of what the characters are seeing and if I would write the whole book this way it would take way too much pages. And if I would split it into more than one book I would still have the problem that the storytelling would feel slow as I take multiple pages just to describe the scene without anything happening yet.
For example, in one scene a human from our world wakes up in a jungle in this new world. The plants are different, the animals are different, the sun is different and even his movement is different since this jungle is kilometres high, with trees connecting to each other so movement is a mixture of walking and climbing and it involves a lot of altitude changing instead of just going a straight line. I feel like I would need to explain everything the man is seeing before I can even start on how he reacts to it and what happens next.
So how can I write about this alien avatar-like world in a way that sufficiently paints the scene but also does not eat through pages faster than a gambling addict eats through his bank account?