This chapter examines the case of the female West German filmmaker Elisabeth Wilms (1905–1981), who started out as a film amateur and became a successful producer of sponsored films. By exploring her methods in industrial film production, the chapter shifts the focus away from highvalue industrial films and their well-known production companies to the lower financial end of film production. The author aims to bring to the fore the historic intersections and interconnections between amateur and industrial filmmaking which have long been overlooked by film studies and exemplifies how filmmaker and client were often amateurs in the film business – a fact that has gained little attention in previous research, but often had a huge impact on the film production process.