What I need to do is to learn how to scroll the characters in and out of the matrix.. any hints?
You could take a look at my code for a scrolling message here: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/DirectDriveLEDMatrix or see this thread: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1203747843/21#21
I didn't use any LED driver chips so you'll have to adapt the display() routine that's called by an interrupt to actually light up the matrix.
Andrew