What do you mean? I don't know what NPA blur is. It is all done by pixels. I just used difefrent colours and adjusted the height of each pixel line above the character on all frames.
It's just 3 frames and if you open it in PJ Image Specs you will see that it's pretty easy, but time consuming. Select a mask of difefrent shape in each frame, and replace the colours. No blur tools are needed to do that. And I thing that real blur tool would result in thousand colours not hundread.
I know this is old but can you post a version without the NPA blur that occurs when he ascends?
It looks like you've used transparency for it, causing the colours to jump from 24 to 78 in one frame. I just felt that was a lot of potentially unecessary colours.
No worries at all, its a great piece :) I love the way the banner comes together, you really nailed it!