Baltimore-based animator Corrie Francis Parks created the mindblowing stop-motion film short “Foreign Exchange”  below utilizing foreign currency notes and sand from more than 50 nations. Watch the film and be amazed and then check out the short video below on her artistic process.

Here’s what she had to say about her painstaking creative process:

Micro-sand animation involves moving grains of sand on a light table with toothpicks and tweezers, then taking a high-resolution photograph after each adjustment to create a sequence of animation. At this scale, the smallest movements have magnified consequences. Shifting the position of one grain can ripple through an entire pile. William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence asks us “To see a World in a Grain of Sand”, drawing attention to the eternal consequences of seemingly terrestrial actions: