witchinghour:

“We knew we wanted it to be beautiful and disturbing, often concurrently within the same shot. In the end, a lot of it was just from nature. We found images that were atmospherically relevant. One I remember was of a vapor trail behind an airplane, and in the sort of vortices, light was reflecting through the water droplets and creating rainbow shapes. That became relevant to how we created the look of The Shimmer. Another was a tree that was covered in thousands, hundreds of thousands of spider webs. The spider webs in the branches made the tree like a tree, but not a tree, and that sort of became the crystal trees at the end of the film. It was that kind of thing.”
– Director Alex Garland on the inspiration behind The Shimmer in Annihilation (2018)