Splitting a display object

I have text field about in the center of my stage. When a button is clicked, I want this text to split and animate out and the new text to appear.

What I thought was to use the Bitmap data object and draw the content movieclip using the .draw() method and then manipulate this pixel data.

But I have only done very trivial things with pixel data in actions script. Can someone help me with what I am trying to do?

Essentially I now have this bitmap data of the movieclip, i want to split in into individual pixels (or small enough chunks) and then animate these chunks.