Illustration by Anna Parini

Janicza Bravo makes short films about loneliness. In one, Michael Cera plays an abrasive paraplegic who can’t get lucky. In another, Gaby Hoffmann plays a phone stalker for whom the description “comes on too strong” is not strong enough. Bravo’s shorts employ the visual grammar of art-house cinema: over-the-shoulder shots representing a character’s point of view, handheld tracking shots depicting urgent movement, lingering closeups to heighten intimacy or unease, carefully composed establishing shots with an actor in the center of the frame.

In March, 2015, Bravo went to Venice, on the western edge of Los Angeles, to meet with a production company called Wevr. The name is pronounced “weaver,” but it can also be thought of as a sentence, with “We” as the subject and “V.R.” as the verb. As anyone who has read a tech blog within the past five years, or a sci-fi novel within the past five decades, knows, “V.R.” stands for virtual reality—a loosely defined phrase that is now being applied to several related forms of visual media. You put your smartphone into a portable device like a Google Cardboard or a Samsung Gear—or you use a more powerful computer-based setup, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive—and the device engulfs your field of vision and tracks your head movement. The filmic world is no longer flat. Wherever you look, there’s something to see.

The producers at Wevr invited Bravo to write and direct a V.R. project. “I said no,” she told me. “It sounded like a technical thing, and I’m not into technical. But then I talked to my husband, and he said, ‘How often do people just hand you money in this business?’ So I changed my mind.” She thought about what kind of story might be told most effectively in the new medium. “The two words I kept hearing about V.R. were ‘empathy’ and ‘immersion,’ and I wasn’t sure that being immersed in one of my dark comedies would be all that useful.”

Instead, she wrote a naturalistic drama about a group of friends who encounter two police officers. Bravo, who is black, tends to write roles for white actors, but for this project she assembled a mostly black cast. In 1999, Bravo’s cousin, who lived in Brooklyn, had a brief confrontation with the N.Y.P.D. that resulted in his death. According to the police, he choked on a bag of drugs. Bravo read a short article about it in the Post. “Name, cause of death—that was it,” she said. “I wanted to bring you inside the world that was left out of that paragraph.” She called her script “Hard World for Small Things,” after a line from the 1955 film “The Night of the Hunter.”

Anthony Batt, one of Wevr’s three founders and its head of content, is a forty-eight-year-old with artfully tousled hair and a bushy, graying beard. Some of Wevr’s projects are computer-animated, some are live action, and some combine both elements. “We start by identifying people with interesting minds, and then we wrap them in a creative bear hug,” Batt said. This can entail weeks of meetings, phone calls, and test shoots designed to help directors unlearn much of what they know about two-dimensional films—or “flatties,” as V.R. triumphalists sometimes call them. Neville Spiteri, Wevr’s C.E.O. and another of its founders, said, “We’ve had traditional scripts that can’t work as V.R. unless they’re totally rewritten.”

For Bravo, the bear hug was relatively painless. “Hard World for Small Things” would be a live-action short, with two scenes filmed on location. The first scene—five minutes of unhurried, semi-improvised dialogue—would place the viewer in a car as it wound through South Central L.A., then idled outside a bodega. The second, much shorter scene would take place inside the store. Bravo would use four wide-angle lenses, pointing in all directions from a single source, positioned so that the viewer felt like one of the friends. Then, in postproduction, Wevr would “stitch” the footage together to make a single spherical image. A three-hundred-and-sixty-degree camera rig picks up everything within view, including boom mikes, external lighting, and lingering crew members. It’s possible to remove such visual detritus in postproduction, but this adds time and expense. The standard practice is to call “Action!” and then run and hide. (The camera rig itself is edited out later.) On traditional film sets, the director and the crew are present for almost every scene; on this shoot the car would hold only the camera rig and the actors, who would be wearing wireless microphones. Bravo told her cast to think of the project not as a film but as an intimate play with an invisible audience.

Luis Blackaller, a producer at Wevr, said, “We all liked the concept. We had only a few choices to make.” Like most V.R. crews, Bravo and her team would shoot with GoPros—cheap, shatterproof cameras that are marketed to extreme athletes, not filmmakers. Matthew Niederhauser, a cinematographer, noted that most V.R. experiences are viewed on phones, and said, “You can shoot with big, expensive lenses, but what’s the point?”

An engineer at Wevr built a camera rig out of aluminum and sandbags, to minimize jostling, and the crew did a test shoot with the rig in the passenger seat. “Watching it, you had to turn around the whole time to make sure you weren’t missing anything in the back of the car, which felt annoying,” Blackaller said. So they decided to film from the back right seat instead. Bravo tweaked her screenplay to remove minor cinematic vestiges—insert shots, subtle blocking details—that would be either irrelevant or impossible in V.R.

“Then we had another big conversation,” Blackaller said. “Do we film a dummy?” In some V.R. experiences, the viewer feels invisible; in others, one can look down to see one’s body represented onscreen. In a clumsily animated V.R. segment produced by another company, I experienced a nightmarish version of the latter: I flew through the air, my legs dangling below me, scrawny and immovable. My arms were those of a white man in his thirties, which happened to match my anatomy but might have been distracting, if not alarming, to most humans. And when I craned my actual neck downward I saw a sharp line where my virtual neck ended, leaving a black void where my head was supposed to be.

Bravo decided to forgo the dummy. The crew filmed for a day, spent three and a half weeks in postproduction, and then submitted the short to the Sundance Film Festival. It was accepted by New Frontier, the festival’s showcase for new media. In “Hard World for Small Things,” you’re sitting next to Sev in the back of a vintage Cadillac convertible. Sev is talking to Dell, who’s driving, about something that sounds interesting—a James Baldwin book, maybe?—but, before you can be sure, Renee, who’s in the front seat, says, “No one ever gives me any books,” and they let the matter drop. It’s a languid, sunny day. A teen-ager on the side of the road throws a football, and it arcs over the top of the car, above your head, and into a yard across the street. Dell parks outside the bodega, where locals are gathered on the sidewalk. Depending on where you’re looking, you might notice one of the women on the curb directing a side-eye glance at Renee, or you might miss it.