- Tonight on WPBS Weekly.

Inside the stories meet Bill Cullen, a model boat maker behind a 15 foot replica of the Edmund Fitzgerald and animator.

Jace Wertz explains what it takes to bring life to clay with stop motion animation.

Plus women in veteran owned business, Humblebee Farms and Lyons Falls shares how they brought hydroponics to the north country.

Your stories, your region.

Coming up right now on WPBS weekly, inside the stores - WPBS weekly inside the stories is brought to you by - When you're unable to see your primary care provider.

The Carthage Walk-in Clinic is here for you.

Located off Route 26 across from Carthage Middle School.

Comfort and Healing close to home when you need it most - North Country Orthopedic Group is there for your urgent ortho or sports related injuries.

With our onsite surgical center and same or next day appointments, we're ready to provide care for patients of all ages.

Your health matters to us North Country Orthopedic Group, keeping healthcare local.

- We are the north country we're protecting one another like family is who we are and where our tomorrow will always be worth defending.

Find out how we keep the north country Strong, at claxtonhepburn.org Today.

- Select musical performances are made possible with funds from the statewide community Regrant program, a REGRANT program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York state legislator administered by the St. Lawrence County Arts Council.

- Good Tuesday evening everyone and welcome to this edition of WPBS Weekly Inside the Stories.

I'm Michael Riecke.

We begin tonight with replicating a sinking ship.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking in Lake Superior.

For the past 25 years, modeled boat maker Bill Cullen has spent his time researching, crafting, and constructing an identical 15 foot replica of the ship that sank all those years ago.

Here's producer Luke Smith with more, - I'm not a professional.

This is a hobby - For model boat maker Bill Cullen.

Constructing replicas of historic ships is his passion, one that requires lots of time and careful crafting.

- I follow closely as I can to original drawings and blueprints and all the rest and that come that I'm able to get.

That's about as difficult as I can make it.

Canada seems to be a lot more difficult to find out material.

The United States I love 'em.

They they could supply you with blueprints, drawings, anything you want with for any of their ships.

It's beautiful.

- Bill has been hard at work recreating the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the American Great Lakes freighter built in 1958, but most people know the ship for sinking in Lake Superior in 1975.

- My work on the Edmund Fitzgerald was kind of encouraged by Gordon Lightfoot song and seeing pictures of the ship.

I thought it would be terrific to do a model of it and at my age, bigger is a whole lot easier to see the model's 15 feet long.

It's a lot easier to work on and that was the encouragement to do it was to to show people or hopefully went to a museum, show people the complete ship before it disappeared.

- But recreating faithful replicas requires research, whether before the first piece is cut or sometimes all throughout the build, - I look on the internet to see if I can come up with hardcover books with detail.

Written information Doesn't do me a whole lot of good.

I've gotta see a picture of it or drawings of it and that's the way it's been with all the models.

Try to get blueprints, actual drawings, scale drawings so that I can see what I've gotta do and how to do it.

As far as the Fitzgerald goes, one thing stands out in my mind that a lot of people don't realize When it went down, it broke up.

One third of the ship is gone, one third of the ship.

And when you look at the model, you take one third outta the center of it, that's four feet.

And it's unbelievable when you look at the model and you figure four feet of that is gone and all that's left is a third at the bow and a third at the stern.

Terrible.

When I did the thing, I had the drawings for the the complete ship and it was easy to construct it.

And then after you find out how much is missing, it's a very big surprise - With research in mind.

He takes his findings through the workshop, a cluttered space he calls the mess.

- The workshop that I've got is definitely a mess.

It is convenient for me to be able to do this.

When you're working on something like this, there's a lot of repetitious things that you do and sometimes it gets a little tiring, continually working on just one part.

So you've got the option to work on something else and you go back and forth.

It makes it a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable.

The deck hatch covers themselves, I believe it's 64 clamps that hold each hatch cover on and I had to make each one of them on there.

And there's 21 hatch covers, so it gets picky.

Very picky.

- Once a boat is in construction, it can take months, even years to complete.

In the case of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Bill's been working on this model since 2000.

- I've been working on the Fitzgerald.

It's been off and on.

There's been like everybody else has details going on in their life.

They have to stop doing things to do other things and it was laid up for quite a while.

And then on again, off again, - Bill says his model of the Edmund Fitzgerald will be completed in a matter of months, hoping to display the finished product in a local museum.

- The Edmund Fitzgerald's is unique to me because I can look at it and see how much work I have put into it and see the finished product now and it's a great deal of pride.

- Is that a general feeling you have when it comes to other models you've made in the past?

- I have to be very honest, yes, not conceited and think, oh well you're really wonderful, but it's when they're finished, you look at it and you think, wow, I actually did that myself.

- For aspiring Model Builders Bill encourages them to follow their passion.

Whether it's model boats or any art style, - Do something that you like.

There's no sense building for somebody else and you're not interested in it because you can't put your oomph into it.

It's a case of it's it's work I I've gotta do it because he wants it.

Whereas if you're doing something that you want to finish, you want to complete and you are very enthused about it, you'll put more effort into it.

Play the music you want to play.

Don't play something for somebody else because you'll want to learn.

And it's the same as everything else.

Do what you want to do - In Gananoque for WPBS Weekly, I'm Luke Smith.

- Stop Motion Animation is a special effects technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments.

And then filmed in this segment, we hear from Stop motion animators living across the globe about this creative filmmaking process.

Take a look.

- The king - I started doing Stop motion when a friend of a family introduced me to the medium.

We had a little VCR camcorder and we'd set up some of our toys and do a little toy Mation.

Life got away from me and I put it aside until I was about 27 years old and then I started picking up a camera again.

I started doing video production.

I would do short films, be live on set with actors, focused directly on knowing how to edit, how to set up a shot, how to light a scene.

I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia last year.

It causes pain all over my body all the time.

It restricts me from being able to venture out and be part of a group.

It's something that helped me transition into stop motion and move away from the live action.

You are the entirety of the crew.

So stop Motion has really given me the ability to uplift myself.

Stop motion is very difficult process, but it's not something that you want to run away from.

You don't have to study in a classroom.

There is a plethora of information out there.

Any kind of forum base will be your best bet.

You can search straight on Google for stop motion forums.

- That's the, the beauty of it for me is just you're constantly learning.

You're constantly getting to do and and figure out new things, new ways of doing stuff and seeing it all come together is, is really awesome and beautiful.

- Creating a stop motion.

There are many elements.

First materials, there's so many that you can utilize.

Whether you wanna use felt paints, foam board from the Dollar Store, - I'm always like hauling like giant bags from the dollar store.

Like I just spent a hundred dollars on craft supplies.

Like I'm the reason that craft aisle is there.

I just love the Dollar Storer.

I just like being like, I made this wizard out of a chicken nugget box and like some sheets of felt and some beads and now he's like real, - Hi there, I'm a wizard but I only know dumb spells about duck.

- I used to like really like playing with like tiny things if it makes sense.

Like I remember making like houses for bugs out of like match boxes and like that kind of stuff.

- What's your story?

Even not having a fully mapped out script is okay.

Having just words on paper is great because it helps you get direction, the route you want to go.

Once that script's finished, storyboarding is the next step.

- I start with the, with the story, then I create a script and then I, I usually work with other artists, like for storyboarding, I create an animatic, I make a shot list, I divide it into sequences and then I start just filming shot by shot.

- I didn't have storyboards, did a quick little breakdown of what I imagined would happen and I got to go ahead to go just with that.

- I feel like for me, my creative process is just to kind of just sit and let things come to me and doodle at the same time.

- Once everything's laid out, then you can bring out the camera.

I recommend grabbing a phone.

There's free software out there.

The fun begins there.

You would take a photo, move the camera a little bit, adjust your set or your, your puppet, take a photo, move the camera, adjust your set and puppet and so on and so forth until you finish out your scene.

Once the puppets are animated, there's a process to remove the rigs.

The rigs are gonna be the ball joint sockets or the metal armatures that are connected to the back or the front or the side of the puppets.

I use After Effects to remove all of the rigs, you just make a layer and another layer and then you overlay the image of the puppet with the rig and then you're able to just remove by highlighting around the rig.

It will show the animation as it should look.

I to remove all of the rigs I started in Photoshop, but the process is it takes much longer.

- I feel like people keep telling me that there's easy ways to do it in Adobe After Effects, but I'm just never, never satisfied with that.

So I end up just photoshopping each individual frame myself.

- CGI has helped stop motion abundantly.

It's provided the ability to not have to have such a large elaborate set, utilize blue or green screens and then be able to just build off of it.

- CGI, I think can complement any animation story and you know, it's the future and it's technology is always gonna be pushing further and further until we reach like a singularity.

But then again it doesn't because it's an art form.

You know, I specifically wanted to use textures that were very hard to mimic in CGI, so that somebody knows that it's a real thing.

Like clay, you can see my fingerprints, you know, you can see the imperfections in it and you can feel like you can reach out and touch it.

- That's what where stop motion kind of shines for me is like knowing that it's a real object.

It's a real thing that's moving through space and how cool it looks.

- Stop motion has this kind of childish like curiosity, playfulness, you know, using whatever they have and and like improvising with the stuff that we have.

- I love stop motion because it's frame by frame.

You have to build the sets, find a little space to do it, have a camera and some software and just have fun with it.

Become a creator and find your passion.

Whatever you choose to do, you're capable of it.

Just have fun and you know the sky's the limit.

It's all about imagination.

- I don't know about you, but I go to some pretty extreme links to keep my rosemary and sage plants growing in the off season at Humblebee Farms in Lions Falls, they do the hard work for you using hydroponics.

They're growing fresh, high quality produce year round, no matter the weather.

- Come on inside, this is where the magic happens.

- Stepping into this cargo container, you won't find surplus items.

Rather countless varieties of lettuce, herbs and edible flowers.

- We grow lots of lettuce.

That's the primary crop that we grow about 10 different varieties of lettuce.

Everything from a soft buttery lettuce to hard crisp romaines.

We also grow amazing beet greens, Swiss chard.

- We saw that there was a deficit in fresh vegetables in the stores.

We believe that food is medicine.

We also believe that eating healthy is the best thing for us.

So we decided we deserve healthy vegetables and so does our community.

- We literally harvest our lettuce every morning and it goes into our store and people know how popular our lettuce are is, and so they will be at our store waiting for us to open so they can make sure they get some, they'll have it for lunch a couple hours later, but they may leave it in their fridge for two or three weeks and find that it's still good because of the fact that it didn't have this long lead time from when it was harvested to when they, they got it on their table.

- That's because of the way it's grown.

At Humblebee Farms, they specialize in hydroponics a farming process using only water and essential nutrients to grow crops.

And in a controlled environment like this one, it means the produce grows faster and tastes better.

- That's fresh.

Wow.

My God.

We're ranging between 98 to 99% germination, which will leave just a few of these open.

We'll put these here in the nursery.

They'll be watered and lit 24 7.

Once they start to grow and are ready for transplant, they will actually be transplanted into our vertical panels.

We transplant between 40 to a hundred plants per panel, depending on the crop.

- In the middle of the foam strip is a wicking strip.

It's a little piece of felt right there.

And we have water that drips from the top and that wicking strip carries that water down to the base of the plant's roots.

And then once the water gets to the bottom and gets in the gutter and then gravity, we'll drain it back to our cultivation tank.

One of the great things about this container is it uses 95% less water than if we were trying to grow produce in the soil.

So in doing that, we can be way more efficient.

So we're producing about 445 heads of lettuce per week.

We can grow up to 990 heads of lettuce per week.

So if you do the math that's roughly, you know, a thousand heads of lettuce, 52 weeks could be doing 52,000 heads of lettuce - And that's at just half capacity.

But for the Cunninghams, it's quality over quantity.

Focusing on growing healthy produce in a sustainable way.

- Most of our land is depleted of all of its nutrients for overuse.

And with water runoff and wind and dirt and exchange of other or reloading with dirts from different properties, you're contaminating your property.

So one of the great things about hydroponic farming in these types of containers is that the majority of the crops are being saved from any type of climate catastrophe.

- We can control all the variables so we know that the water that we use is pure water, no harmful chemicals, no pesticides, herbicides, anything like that.

It's just a hundred percent H2O with some added nutrients like you would find in good soil, a little potassium, a little nitrogen, a little calcium, a little magnesium, and just a trace amount of amino acids make it really nice and robust and healthy.

Since settling in Lions - Falls, humblebee Farms has provided healthy greens for a community that has welcomed them with open arms, which inspired Kristen and Brandon to give back in another way, establishing this historic train depot as a local market, - I thought, what better yet than to be able to find a space, a historical building in Lions Falls that had been sitting vacant for years.

Let's revitalize it.

Let's revitalize the town and let's create a space for all of our local artisans to bring in their baked goods, their natural products, their quilts, their aprons where they could bring all of their stuff and we would sell it for them.

- We now have 140 plus different families, small mom and pop home producers making all these fantastic products.

And so for me it's wonderful.

The overwhelming feedback we get from every customer who comes back in the store is how much they love the market, how much diversity is there, how many great products are there, whether it's cultivating - Healthy hydroponic produce or giving back to the community.

Humblebee farms and the depot market are here to stay.

And as issues like climate change arise, innovative farming techniques like this are important for the future of agriculture.

- I want people to go away realizing that everybody's gonna have to be involved if we wanna really improve things in our country.

And when it comes to nutrition and feeding ourselves and our health, they are tied together that our gut health is, is the starting point for our overall health.

So I want people to take away that we're going to have to do more farming like this rather than gigantic farms that use lots of pesticides and harsh chemicals and and harvest produce before it's prime.

You know, in order for us to start healing from right here, - I really think this is the farming of the future.

God bless our farmers.

I mean without them we would have nothing.

Unfortunately, agriculture is facing so, so many catastrophes between the weather and climate change and flooding and all of the things that we're experiencing crops are, are being diminished just by natural disasters.

If we had two acres of land and, and a 40 foot container and we filled that two acres worth of land with however many freight farm containers, just think of how much we could grow.

- We feed all of Lewis and Jefferson County if, if that were the case and and hopefully someday we will.

It's, you know, it's a process we're growing - In.

Lions falls for WPBS weekly, I'm Luke Smith.

- Onion Pakora is next on the menu from One World Kitchen.

These tasty deep fried treats are classic Indian Street food, light, crunchy, and easy to make.

They're perfect with a mint chutney, or even plain sour cream.

Onion pakora will make an interesting appetizer for your next party.

Enjoy - No matter what country you visit in the world, each one has its own unique deep fried goodie in India.

That's the pakora.

And here's my super simple recipe.

So what is a pakora?

It's a deep fried nugget of goodness.

And in India, everyone likes to grab a nice cold beer and munch on pakora.

It's the perfect pairing.

Now I'm using chilies and you know, I don't want all the heat in it, so I'm just gonna flick away the seeds.

Flick them away.

Green chilies done.

Now the chickpea flour, it's also known as Graham flour and it's a hundred percent gluten-free.

A little bit of baking powder for lightness and some salt.

I love coriander.

It has this beautiful citrusy aroma and a beautiful bright green color.

Now this to my friends, is the base for my batter and a little bit of water to bind my batter.

It's gonna give all these onions and veggies a nice coating, almost the texture of pancake batter, but a little thicker.

I've got some canno oil heating at about 350 degrees.

You can use grape seed oil or vegetable oil, and it's a perfect temperature to get a nice crisp on my pakora.

If you're not comfortable working with hot oil, then you can just use a spoon and spoon them into the oil.

And now time for some pakora magic.

You thought these MACRAs were fast?

Well, my mint and coriander chetney is even faster.

A big bunch of fresh mint, citrusy coriander.

Couple of slices of ginger.

Really great for your tummy.

Here's my friend Mr. Chili.

Again, I've taken out those seeds.

That's gonna add a little bit of tartness.

Make your taste buds do a little, little jig.

Last but not least, a little bit of salt.

And in six seconds, I'm gonna have some fantastic chetney.

When you have a party at home, gotta make a platter of these because your friends are going to love you.

Hmm, the first thing I get is lemon.

It's nice and tart.

Cora is nice and Frenchy and I love those sweet onions on the inside.

CORAs, gotta try them.

- That does it for this Tuesday night.

Join us next time for a fresh look inside the stories, remembering our fallen service members with a visit to Fort Drums, military cemeteries, and the Frederick Remington Art Museum houses the largest collection of Remington's works in the world.

Discover the fascinating story of this prolific artist.

Also discover how Chin lock wrestling has become a cornerstone of the Kingston community.

Meantime, if you have a story idea you'd like us to explore, we'd love to learn more.

All you need to do is drop us an email at wpbsweekly @wpbstv.org and we'll share it with the region.

That's it for now.

Everyone have a safe night.

We'll see you next time.

Take care.

- WPBS weekly.

Inside the stories is brought to you by - When you're unable to see your primary care provider.

A Carthage Walk-in clinic is here for you.

Located off Route 26 across from Carthage Middle School.

Comfort and Healing close to home when you need it most - North Country Orthopedic Group is there for your urgent ortho or sports related injuries.

With our onsite surgical center and same or next day appointments, we're ready to provide care for patients of all ages.

Your health matters to us.

North Country Orthopedic Group, keeping healthcare local.

- We are the north country.

We're protecting one another like family is who we are and where our tomorrow will always be worth defending.

Find out how we keep the north country Strong, at claxtonhepburn.org Today.

- Select musical performances are made possible with funds from the statewide Community Regrant program, a REGRANT program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of the Governor and the New York State legislator administered by the St. Lawrence County Arts Council.

- The deck Hatch covers themselves, I believe it's 64 clamps that hold each hatch cover on.

And I had to make each one of them on there.

And there's 21 hatch covers, so it gets picky.

Very picky.