Just thought I'd post one of my recent projects, an LED table top using 2 Adafruit LED strips in a matrix, an Arduino and a SeeedStudio SD shield.
It reads animation files created for the 1E Disco Dance Floor on demand from an SD card. The files are frames of 32x16 animations, the code reads 7x7 of a single frame, sends it to the LED matrix, then reads the next. Hope this helps or inspires! Cheers.