By Erika Scafuro

Behind the glasses with the dark lenses with which we have learned to know him in his vlogs, lies the attentive gaze of those who are able to observe reality and transform different themes into video content that record millions of views. Emanuele Malloru – for all Emalloru – has made entertainment on the web his job. For about a year on his social channels we have also seen him surfing and “Fare l’amore con le onde” is the video that tells the love story between Emalloru and surfin.

What was your first approach to surfing?
“I tried surfing for the first time last year. I spent a week with other guys with a surf school. I was simply curious, I didn’t know what to expect: I had a fairly distorted image of surfing because I thought surfing was just riding high waves and doing extreme stuff. The truth is that those are the images that come from the outside because they are the most captivating ones and being a very niche sport, sometimes come only the images of ultra-pro surfers who do big wave surfing.
And I had a lot of fun surfing and above all I fell in love with the context, so not only the fact of being on the surfboard to ride the wave, but everything that includes surfing: therefore getting up very early at dawn, putting on the ice wetsuit with the sand scraping you, throw yourself into super cold water. And then the feeling of gratification when maybe after all that effort you are also waiting an hour, forty minutes in the line up, you wait for the exact moment and then … infinite pleasure”.

You titled the video dedicated to surfing, “Fare l’amore con le onde” (make love with the waves, ed). How’s your love story going with surfing?
“Good! I am still learning to surf. I realized, especially by knowing some really smart guys who have been practicing this sport for a very long time and are and have also been champions, that surfing is so difficult and that it takes many years where every year you enter the water several times to be able to appreciate surfing more and more. I’m not saying to be able to learn to surf well because surfing is one of those sports that you probably have to do for twenty years to learn it well, but every time you enter the water, in addition to the slaps you take from the waves, you may acquire that little skill which makes you feel more confindent. It’s something you really build in a very long time”.

Is it more exciting to shoot a surfing video or to be in the water among the waves?
“It’s absolutely more exciting to have nothing but your own wetsuit, a leash attached to your ankle with your surfboard and that’s it. But clearly I enjoyed shooting this video”

What’s the secret to entertaining so many people online?
There is no secret. There is commitment and perseverance because in the end when you start doing entertainment on the web you lack so many skills, you lack so many notions that it is useless for someone else to explain them to you because it’s all stuff you learn from yourself, trying and trying again. So the more time you stay constant in doing what you do, the better you become and therefore you retain your audience, you make it bigger and bigger”.

Through the videos you also deal with current issues. In “La mia estate italiana” (My Italian Summer, ed) you talk about your enterprise in wanting to collect as much waste as possible from Italian beaches. What perception did you have while traveling around Italy for such an important cause?
“The perception I got is that people are really arrogant. We do not realize that it is not so much the extreme attention on how to differentiate or do exaggerated things as well as becoming vegan to prevent too much CO2 from being produced in intensive farming. The point is to do one’s part in one’s own small way, which is the message that I put in the video and that is what I really understood from the week spent collecting waste on the beach. Because it is also enough for a person to throw the candy wrapper on the ground and the sum of millions of candy wrappers become kilos and tons of garbage which if it ends up on the beach is even more dangerous because it is inevitable than with storm surges that waste ends up in the sea. And then there are problems that we know very well. So I tried to raise awareness of something that in fact everyone knows, but that everyone continues to ignore. So every now and then I have to bother trying to retract the same issue, perhaps with a bit of light weight as I did so with entertainment content, it certainly doesn’t hurt”.

The average of those who follow you on Youtube is around 20 years old. What advice would you give to a young person who wants to establish himself as a vlogger?
“The only advice I would feel like giving to myself in the past, and therefore to a twenty-year-old who wants to identify with, is to do it exclusively if you enjoy doing it and if you are able to find a monetization fee because in any case devote yourself to a working in web entertainment takes the full time of any other job. So if you want to do it, or make all your free time available and then live doing something else and you cultivate this as a hobby, but it is a very time-consuming hobby. If a guy decides to do it with the utmost commitment, he must do it with the logic of being able to monetize, then create content that can potentially be sold to a hypothetical company”.

Who and what inspires you?
“I am not inspired by any particular person, but I am inspired by a lot of creatives, directors, writers…all the people who somehow manage to send even a very small message that causes a slight jolt in my mind. So any person who can create a small spark for me is someone I consider to be a reference because then from a small spark a whole chain reaction is unleashed in your mind that makes you then do great actions”.