molding faces from a patch of dough in Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902), considered as foreshadowing of clay animation. In 1905, Porter showed animated letters and very simple cutout animation of two hands in the intertitles in How Jones lost his roll. Porter experimented with a small bit of crude stop-motion animation in his trick film Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). The "Teddy" Bears (2 March 1907), made in collaboration with Wallace McCutcheon Sr., mainly shows people in bear costumes, but the short film also features a short stop-motion segment with small teddy bears. On 15 February 1908, Porter released the trick film A Sculptor's Welsh Rabbit Dream that featured clay molding itself into three complete busts. No copy of the film has yet been located. It was soon followed by the similar extant film The Sculptor's Nightmare (6 May 1908) by Wallace McCutcheon Sr. J. Stuart Blackton J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel (23 February 1907) featured a combination of live-action with practical special effects and stop motion animation of several objects, a puppet and a model of the haunted hotel. It was the first stop motion film to receive wide scale appreciation. Especially a large close-up view of a table being set by itself baffled viewers; there were no visible wires or other noticeable well-known tricks. This inspired other filmmakers, including French animator Émile Cohl and Segundo de Chomón. De Chomón would release the similar The House of Ghosts and El hotel eléctrico in 1908, with the latter also containing some very early pixilation. The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908, considered lost) by Blackton and his British-American Vitagraph partner Albert E. Smith showed an animated performance of the figures from a popular wooden toy set. Smith would later claim that this was "the first stop-motion picture in America". The inspiration would have come from seeing how puffs of smoke behaved in the interrupted recordings for a stop trick film they were making. Smith would have suggested to get a patent for the technique, but Blackton thought it wasn't that important. Smith's recollections are not considered to be very reliable. Émile Cohl Blackton's The Haunted Hotel made a big impression in Paris, where it was released as L'hôtel hanté: fantasmagorie épouvantable. When Gaumont bought a copy to further distribute the film, it was carefully studied by some of their filmmakers to find out how it was made. Reportedly