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Rings of Power Trailer gets DESTROYED with Hilarious Comments!
From the very beginning it was always going to be an animated film. We just thought a live-action version of this would be way too intense. We thought animation was the perfect gateway to have these deep conversations about loss and grief.
— Govier on deciding to expand the project into an animated film
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 2020. 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.