According to writers
Will McCormack and
Michael Govier, who became friends at an acting school, the initial idea for the film came from a meeting between the two at
Griffith Park, where Govier thought about making a film where shadows represented emotions people could not reach. McCormack agreed, opining it is a "powerful" premise. The goal of the film was to show "the grief that still lingers on in the community, even though maybe the
news cycle has left them, and what that grief looks like." To direct the film, the pair met with several parents who had lost their children to school shootings and
gun violence in the United States, aware of the sensitive subject matter. The pair also worked closely with
Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, allowing the organizations to share their own feedback on the film's script and amplify its overall theme. To bring out their self-funded idea as an animated film, the pair first met with producer Maryann Garger. Soon after,
If Anything Happens I Love You began production in late 2018, with animation taking place from April 2019 to the December of that same year. In total, twenty-eight people worked on the short film, including Youngran Nho, Haein Michelle Heo, and Julia Gomes Rodrigues, who used
TVPaint Animation to animate the project. Production concluded in February 2021. To address the importance of diversity and representation in animation, the short was animated, composed, and lead-produced by an all-female crew. The film was produced by Govier, who wrote the 12-page script for the short film with McCormack in a year. Shortly after, Nho was hired while she was attending the
California Institute of the Arts to work as an animator and
artistic director on the short, having been recommended by professor Maija Burnett, using the black-and-white palette from the
Academy Award-winning short film
Father and Daughter as inspiration. According to Nho, the film's background consisted of
watercolor on paper to make the story feel "raw" and "unfinished," mentioning that the film attempted to have minimum color in its background to match the "emptiness that fills [the] grieving parents." According to McCormack and Govier, the pair wanted to tell a story through anthropomorphic shadows, and as a result, multiple sequences were not drawn with "full
technicolor" as they wanted to "illustrate and explore grief" in the short film. To keep in touch with Nho and the rest of the crew, McCormack and Govier used the software
Slack to communicate, "critiquing and confirming each other's work in real-time." Most of the film's score was composed by Lindsay Marcus, with the "Beautiful Dreamer" sequence of the film being arranged and performed by the Inner-City Youth Orchestra of LA run by Charles Dickerson. In an interview for
Animation Scoop, McCormack revealed that the song "
1950" was chosen for the film because the pair were listening to it while searching for music for the short. Also produced by
Gary Gilbert and
Gerald Chamales, the film was edited by Peter Ettinger on
Adobe Premiere Pro. ==Release and reception==