Can anyone help me out with a lighting kit suggestion? I'm looking to spend about $800 to $1000 on the kit. I'll be mostly using it for mid to small interior shots.
For my tastes, lighting is more expensive than that. Sure, you could get a lowell kit for that money, and lowell lights aren't *bad* per-say, but you really need a true fresnel housing to effectively use most of your lights in most situations, and that means at least $1300. If this is acceptable, I recommend Arri, LTM, and of course Mole-Richardson. I can't imagine a dvx shooter needing any fixture over 500w, except for special cases, and the 100-300w fixtures would be the most versatile.
For cost-efficiency, chinese lanterns, photoflood bulbs, and some homemade zip-cords can get you some great lighting for relatively cheap. If you need strong direct light, you can normally find something better than inexpensive "pro" lights like the lowells. Lowells are great to add emphasis to certain areas of a set or objects in a scene, but I'd never point one at talent. Too unweildy, intsense, and uncontrollable.
Back to the cheap way to go... I've used Chinese lanterns with 500w photofloods as a key/set light, and often don't need a fill, or use a 100w-300w photoflood in a lantern for that purpose. For a backlight I'll use a 100w-300w clip-on lamp. Home Depot can be the source of a million fun lighting tools (zip-cords, dimmers, clip-on lamps) as long as you aren't afraid of a little do-it-yourself. And I *am* afraid of DIY, but making a zip cord yourself is *really* easy. Another benefit of all of this stuff is that you can usually find power for your whole setup in a single room, so cable running is minimalized.
If it were me, I'd invest in some stands for hanging lanterns and clip-on lights, some high-capacity extension cords (stingers) and a large array of DIY stuff with photofloods.
