Wallpapers and Walling

Hey all, Finals being almost done with (and my hair starting to grow back) I've been thinking about a project to learn photoshop with. I had an idea to design an active-wall a while ago using an animated .gif format, then thought "hey, why not a whole web page?". What I want to do is take a large image of the laughing man logo from GITS:SAC and animate it in the style that [not gonna spoil it, don't worry] "that guy" did.

This poses some problems for me as I've never used photoshop before, nor have I made any animated .gifs. I'll continually update my progress, but at this rudimentary phase I was wondering if there was any good advice or methods I should be aware of for making the rotating letters, and how to get that to "phase" with the moving face. Things like how far I should allow the letters to move for each frame vs. how much space that will take up would be very helpful, and also any good methods for rotating letters around a circle (that will disappear for some time).

Thanks for any input or helpful insights.