Setting the initial grade and letting my grade evolve with the story as it’s told. I'm not massive on secondaries, they come when they are needed. I always try to work with what I've got in front of me because I trust that what the DP shot is good enough to translate to emotion.

Because I come from the photochemical world I started grading on digital systems using colour, density, contrast and then saturation – I could do a lot with that.

In Baselight I can work the same way with the film grade to give the base, but in addition I can use the video grade tools – lift, gamma, gain – to get to all the little nuances. The video grade is the only way I can lift the blacks a tiny bit without lifting the whole image or losing contrast because I like my highlights. So being able to separate my blacks, mids and highlights changes everything for me.

And being able to use the film and video grades in separate layers, and very quickly go from one to the other, means that I can work with my style of grading and really free myself from the machine. I can be quite intuitive with what I do and achieve a lot with very little – but when I need to go a bit further I've got all the other tools at hand.

I used softened shapes to separate one part of the image from another in a very ’loose’ way, which you cannot really see, to give something subtle to the image. They are incredibly quick – Baselight can do what I want without me really having to think about it and that was very important for me grading Lion, as I didn’t want a machine getting in front of my emotions.

The main camera was the ARRI Alexa – we used the ARRIRAW files, plus they had some other cameras on the drones, and VFX as well, so there was a mix-and-match of different resolutions and file formats.

The visual effects were done at the studio Iloura, which I was able to work pretty closely with. They took the same RAW files that I had and worked with a graded reference, but then gave me back ungraded DPX files. It was a very transparent process.

We set up the Baselight job with one reel per scene and I basically just graded the film the way the story is told. I started at the beginning and finished at the end. The edit didn't change much during the DI because the cut was very close by the time I started grading. After that, the cut changes were mostly tweaks.

The main deliverable was the P3 grade for cinema. For the HD version we spent a fair bit of time and found that we couldn't quite get it right in the blacks on certain shots. So we went back to the P3 and adjusted it in the film grade in order to be able to work accurately in HD, which actually benefited not only the HD version but also the film grade.

There isn't really any scene in the movie that was not either enjoyable or challenging but there is a scene between Saroo and his adoptive mother (played by Nicole Kidman) where he gives her a cuddle – with that scene it was very difficult to get the right amount of what you could read on his face. I also had to adjust Nicole's hair to make sure that the red was not overpowering.

When we first see Australia there is a different feel to the image compared to the contemporary Australia and this is basically in-between. It's got some of the softness and gentleness of the harsh Indian world but set in Australia, so you have stronger colours. When you move ahead to the contemporary Australia, it's more muted and normal so you can relate to it.

For me grading Lion was very enjoyable as it was really about letting the images be the support for my emotions, and this is one of the reasons why I love my job.

With Baselight I feel paradoxically free from the machine.

The built-in colour management is extremely powerful. To be able to use the machine to just grade and have it do what I want it to do by giving me everything back in P3 is great. If I’m asked to do a job with a mix of Red and Alexa and Blackmagic and dodgy stock shots, my answer is “sure, whatever!”. I just have to set it up right before I start working. Once that’s all done I don't have to worry about camera LUTs, I can just get on with grading.

Sometimes I can use an image in a colour space that it was not designed for and get so much more out of it – it gives me another space in which I can work.

In Baselight there is always a way to do what you want and quite often there are different ways, which means that the system can adapt to me and I can concentrate on the image rather than having to deal with the machine.

That's the biggest thing for me - that flexibility of the colour management plus being able to adapt Baselight to my way of thinking.

Soon I should be starting the grade on the Picnic At Hanging Rock TV series, made from the classic Peter Weir film. I very much look forward to being part of that project.