The virtual reality film Noto 1693: The day of fear reconstructs the events of the fateful 11 January 1693, the day in which the medieval city of Noto which stood on Mount Alveria (today Noto Antica) was hit by an earthquake that devastated it in the arc a few seconds . 
Through the vision of this innovative digital cinematographic work, it is possible to appreciate the faithful reconstruction of environments and characters that really existed in Noto, in an emotional crescendo where cinematographic fiction and history meet for an immersive and engaging experience. The viewer, wearing a virtual reality viewer, travels back in time to experience firsthand the hours before the devastating earthquake.
The 11 degree earthquake on the Mercalli Scale left nothing but death and devastation behind. The extension of the earthquake was very large, almost 14,000 square kilometers and the deaths immediately numbered in the thousands, 54,000 in total in eastern Sicily. About 3,000 were registered in Noto: one out of four inhabitants died. This is the strongest seismic event ever recorded in Italy in the last thousand years . 

The emotional memory of the earthquake is still etched in the collective memory of the citizens of Noto and it is possible to trace a profile even in the stories that the elderly have been handed down for generations. Appealing to this memory, castings were conducted among the citizens of Noto, which led to the choice of 30 "actors" to impersonate the historical characters of the film. Thanks to a morphing technique, the faces of today's citizens have been acquired through a program and brought back in 3D on the faces of the characters of the past. This stylistic choice was dictated by the desire to create a sort of "bridge" between generations more than three centuries away, in order to highlight the relationship, always alive, between the past and the present . 
The film, commissioned by the Municipality of Noto, was produced by Sebastiano Deva's AppTripper, with the collaboration of a scientific committee that supervised the different phases of the project.