Cassius – Thanks for pointing me in the direction of that plugin! That’s exactly what I’m looking for in my project and I can see plenty of interesting uses for it in the future. Thank you!
Kevin – I appreciate the guidance! Unfortunately, I was still having a couple of problems with how the final result was coming out. However, your suggestion gave me an idea and I ended up just converting the individual letters into shapes and manipulating the dimensions to stretch over time. Then I added in a slight RGB split with some motion blur and it worked really well.