Laughing Man Logo

Edit*********
Flash is dead so this GIF version will have to do:
sushiman0001.deviantart.com/ar…

Yet another Laughing Man logo. I know what you're thinking, I'm just another “copy-cat” but hear me out.
I know that lots of people have done something like this as fanart already (just do a search on Laughing Man) but trust me mine is different! First of all mine is animated and most others are static. The other animated ones that I have found rotate in the wrong direction or at a poor frame rate. Another difference is that mine is darker than almost every other one. That is because most other people use a different screenshot as a reference. I'll show you what I mean. This link shows the reference that most people use and the one I used: img302.imageshack.us/img302/57…

If you look closely you can see that the word that is covered by the cap is partially repeated. That is what makes it difficult to animate. I can't just have one sentence rotate and loop that animation. I had to duplicate the sentence, offset the duplicate and only have part of each sentence show at any given time. That was how I made the obscured word appear on both sides of the cap so that the entire sentence is showing at all times, just like the original used in Ghost in the Shell. Another obstacle was the fact that Flash 8 doesn't have a text-to-path feature. Meaning that I can't write a sentence and then have it curve into a circle. Each letter is it's own independent element which is why they appear to jitter slightly as they rotate.

I made the frame rate 29.97 frames per second because that is what NTSC Televisions (American TV's) run at, and that is the frame rate used in the DVD I watched that had this logo in it. I also timed how long it took for the logo to rotate at 29.97 FPS and I am as close as I can get to the original. The only thing missing is the bloom effect which can be seen at the reference link above in the last picture. So other than the bloom effect, I did everything I could to make this just like the original.

The original was made by Paul Nicholson when Kenji Kamiyama asked him to make a logo for the Ghost in the Shell series. The sentence is a quote from The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. The quote in its entirety goes,

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life".

You might want to right-click on it and set the quality to low because it is very CPU intensive. (I blame the lack of text-to-path functionality.) Leave a comment and tell me if I missed anything.

Edit*********
Newer version with bloom here: www.deviantart.com/deviation/4…

Edit*********
Bumped the letter "g" up because it was always a tad misaligned. I left that way in the original because I was lazy. Thanks to ~CarlosMC for calling me out on it.