ABOVE: Bruce and Shelly Abitz, owners of Gemini Studios in Fairmont, stand before hundreds of games and events they’ve filmed, edited and archived over the years.

FAIRMONT– Gemini Studios has been a fixture in the Fairmont community for decades. The studio is owned and operated by Bruce and Shelly Abitz.

Many people are probably aware of of all the events, including Fairmont City Council meetings and sport games, that Gemini livestreams. However, Gemini actually started out as a music store.

“In my previous life I was a rock n’ roller,” Bruce said.

Both he and Shelly are originally from the area and after moving away to go to college, they returned to Fairmont. While they both initially had different careers, Bruce began Gemini Music, which he ran out of his home for awhile before moving to Downtown Plaza in the 80s. The store had everything from horn and violin rentals to amps and sound systems.

However, by the late 90s, a shift needed to take place.

“Music stores nationwide were struggling. I was told by suppliers that I was the only store left in a town this size. I was a dinosaur, basically. I held on longer than I probably should have because of the passion,” Bruce said.

While he had a passion for music, he had another passion: being a dedicated father. Bruce said while he was thinking of what to do next, he was regularly attending his two daughters’ functions. One was in sports and one was in the arts.

“I would always take my camera out and record their events,” Bruce said.

He pointed out that both music and video deal with sound, which he had extensive experience and knowledge in.

Around the late 70s, before he had the music store, Bruce started being asked by churches to install sound systems so that bands could play during the service. He and Shelly started traveling to other states in order to meet the demands.

“To this day I’m still doing that,” he said.

To date he works with about 150 churches across the country that call him with questions.

“As technology changes, I’ll have a church call me and say, ‘Bruce, we want to stream. How do we do that?’ I engineer these turn-key systems… each one that I set up is unique for that churches’ purpose,” Bruce said.

As word got out that he was doing this, he started to get other inquires about engineering systems. In the late 90s, he got a request from the Fairmont Area School District to help set up a TV studio and media class. Bruce said he and Fairmont High School teacher Tom Kuisle started covering some games together.

“What happened is we would cover a sport, and another sport would say, ‘hey, can you do that for us?’ Then another sport asked,” Bruce said.

He was excited at the prospect of covering high school sports and pointed out that at that time, a lot of media was focused on the negative things that students were doing.

“I thought, I’m up against the police blotter. I want to showcase kids doing good things because 99.9 percent of them are. I thought if I could get a community behind a town and a school district by positiveness, that would be a fulfilling thing,” Bruce said.

At the time he started, Bruce said they would go out and film a game or event, bring the film back, put it on tape and then do a delay broadcast, which was a time consuming endeavor.

Of course, technology has greatly changed since the 90s. Bruce recalled the first time they did a live broadcast from Mahoney Field in the early 2000s.

“We ran cable all the way from the school to the field. It was the first ever in the state live broadcast. I still have a copy of that in my archives,” Bruce said.

At that time he was doing the work on a volunteer basis but was making his living by dubbing tapes and installing sound systems.

“I loved when it was game day and I could just go out and watch the kids play,” Bruce said.

His daughter Jenne was in football for three years and Bruce said he has every single tape of every play she was ever in.

“I knew what that meant to me and thought if it meant that much to me, it had to mean something to other people to archive these plays,” Bruce said.

There have been many instances that people have called him up looking for a specific play or game from events years ago.

“People can’t believe that I keep all these things,” Bruce said.

In fact there’s a whole room inside Gemini Studios with hundreds of tapes from games over the years. Bruce and Shelly work on converting the tapes to DVDs, flash drives or whatever other form people want them in.

Bruce has received hundreds of emails from parents around the state, thanking him for capturing these moments.

“We were streaming before anyone else in the state,” Bruce said.

Gemini has covered baseball, softball, wrestling, hockey, soccer, cross country, track, tennis, golf, girls and boys basketball, volleyball and football.

“Sometimes we’ve been to up to 125 games and events a school year,” Bruce said.

While they cover almost all home games, they’ve also covered some away games.

“I have a volunteer crew. These guys basically take time off from work and give up part of their life just to go out because they know the meaning of it,” Bruce said.

He said that covering a hockey game alone requires a seven person crew.

While he started covering sports, he had another daughter in the arts and felt a pull to cover those events, too.

“That’s when I first went to the school for some help,” Bruce said, adding that Butch Hanson was the superintendent at the time.

For years Gemini has also covered choir, band and orchestra concerts, as well as prom.

It was the mid-2000s when Gemini started streaming, first on YouTube, then later on Facebook. However, because those platforms can be unreliable, Bruce purchases an annual package from BoxCast, which he can keep archives on for a year.

“It’s very reliable. I’ve never had a failure,” Bruce said.

A perk of the software is that Bruce can see not only the number of people who watch, but where they’re watching from. He’s been surprised to see it’s not just around the state, not just around the country, but even in other locations in the world.

“That’s what Shelly and I really love about what we’re doing. Instead of hearsay, you see it. This lets us know our work is reaching out and touching people,” Bruce said.

Gemini has been live-streaming Fairmont City Council meetings since the mid-2000s but has had a hand in the broadcast long before that as Bruce helped engineer the system.

“I engineered two video systems for Fairmont High School. There was several years where there wasn’t a media class but three or four years ago Joe (Brown, former superintendent) called me back and me and Shelly engineered one,” Bruce said.

He noted that his strength is in camera, switchers and the computers whereas Shelly’s in in editing.

While the two have helped on and off with media classes at Fairmont High School, for over 25 years Bruce and Shelly have taught the media class at Martin Luther High School in Northrop. Students from the school come to Gemini Studios to use the equipment.

“That’s the most rewarding job me and Shelly have ever had because we get an opportunity to use media to teach young people about real life,” Bruce said.

A large part of what Gemini does is broadcast video and information for the public.

Gemini is responsible for the content that runs on channel 12, Fairmont Public Access Channel, which is for pubic announcements.

“We run over 12 church services on it, at no cost to the churches,” Bruce said.

Channel 13 is the governmental channel, which Gemini designed and engineered. The channel runs city-oriented information. City Council meetings run on that channel and Fairmont School Board meetings used to, too.

Beginning this next week, Gemini will no longer be responsible for filming and streaming Fairmont School Board meetings. This comes following an announcement in June that the contract between the Fairmont Area School District and Gemini Studios has not been renewed. This will also affect Gemini Studio’s long-standing coverage of sport games and other events.

While their work load may have dropped, Gemini will still stay busy covering Fairmont City Council meetings, running the public access channel, installing sound systems, filming business videos, commercials and advertisements and converting media.

“I always have boxes of projects waiting here ready to go,” Bruce said.

Even though Gemini lost funding from the school, Bruce said he still wants to do some sports filming in Fairmont but that it will be dependent on sponsorship help.

Most importantly, Bruce and Shelly have no plans to slow down or retire.

“This community has really backed me with sports and arts filming. Me and Shelly have never felt more appreciated. When you get a community behind you that believes in what you’re doing, that makes you want to come to work,” Bruce said.