Kartiki Gonsalves, on filming The Elephant Whisperers

• Kartiki Gonsalves has had her debut film – The Elephant Whisperers – shortlisted for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. It took her five years to complete the project. She spent 18 months just ensuring that her subjects, a couple and their two adopted elephant calves, were comfortable around her and her crew of three. “I wanted them to be so used to the camera that they would forget it was there,” she says. The result is a luminous, moving work that captures the everyday life of this unusual family. The documentary is 42 minutes long, gleaned from hundreds of hours of footage. Here are Gonsalves’s favourite memories from all those hours spent behind the lens.