Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 25)

by Elizabeth Shimer Bowers When Nicholas Conn was born—100 days early— he weighed one pound, his heart was the size of a cashew, and his doctors gave him a 0.00004% chance of survival. “No one thought Nicholas was going to make it through his ﬁrst night,” says Brian Hoven ’96, Nicholas’ uncle and the man behind the footage that became Little Man, a documentary about Nicholas’ amazing survival story. “Then he was given one week to live, then two weeks, and so on….” The film started out as a documentary about surrogacy. Hoven’s sister, Nicole Conn, a documentary filmmaker, hired a surrogate mother to carry her and her life partner Gwen’s baby, and she was planning to capture the surrogacy experience on camera. But when Nicholas was born nearly three months early, Conn’s plans took an unexpected and heartwrenching turn. “I had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and I didn’t have a full-time job yet,” Hoven recalls. “I was planning to go into the “Little Man,” the documentary that chronicles Nicholas Conn’s amazing story, has won more than a dozen prestigious awards. film industry—like my sister—and I had just purchased a semiprofessional camera. Suddenly, due to complications in the surrogate mother’s pregnancy, Nicholas came very early and I just started taking footage.” Cameras are off-limits in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), but Nicholas’ doctors made an exception because they assumed he wasn’t going to make it. “When Nicholas was born 100 days early, his ﬁrst three months were so intense that I no longer cared about anything but his survival,” Conn says. “Brian lived with me at the hospital, primarily as one of my greatest supports. He kept taking footage and one night he said, ‘I think you should take a look at this.’ He showed me the early shots that he had taken, and that’s the moment Little Man was born.” Hoven suggested that his sister scrap the surrogacy documentary and shift her focus to the tiny infant who was struggling to survive. Hoven became the ﬁrst producer of the documentary, and the moving story of Little Man began to unfold. “I was working on films here and there as a contractor, but any day that I wasn’t working, I would go to the hospital and spend the day with my sister,” Hoven says. “Technically, I am a coproducer of the project. I helped edit the spec that got us the funding for the ﬁlm, and I wrote the music for the spec and some of the original music for the ﬁlm itself.” fall 2007 25

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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