Taylor & Laina Brown
Winnipeg
Genre: Comedy
Filmography: Big Small Town
Taylor Brown and Laina Brown are the sibling duo behind the Fibe TV1 series Big Small Town. Taylor is the director and executive producer of the series while Laina is the cinematographer and producer. They are also the co-founders of Folks Films, a production company they began in 2016. Big Small Town humourously showcases Winnipeg's finest comedians through various forms of sketch comedy, featuring sentient self-checkout machines and Halloween funerals. The series brings attention to Winnipeg's small-town charm while simultaneously highlighting the city's noteworthy talent.
What inspired you to create Big Small Town?
Taylor: What inspired making this show is just getting involved with the comedy scene here in Winnipeg. We have been involved in the film scene for a long time, but attending a lot of comedy shows, stand-up comedy, and sketch comedy… there's so much talent here that doesn't have a lot of opportunity to get their stuff made. Being able to produce something with really talented comedians, sketch comics and local talent was a total dream to be able to put people in the roles that they feel like they can sell. We need to be able to showcase the unreal talent that we've got going on [in Winnipeg].
What were some of the challenges you faced during the shoot?
Laina: Because it was a sketch comedy series, each sketch had to have a different location. We shot one day at a football field, and the next would be at a funeral home, and then a bus, a museum… so there was a lot of learning on the fly, kind of like film school. We had a lot of intense, one-day shoots. For the sketch on a bus, we wanted it to be snowing outside, and of course, when it came time to shoot, it wasn’t snowing. That ended up being a challenge and we had to blow fake snow onto the bus, which is something that we didn’t anticipate. You learn as you go and that’s the most important lesson.