CreativeDojo’s VinhSon Nguyen has a look at creating an electric reveal effect for type in After Effects that can really have a great technical or technically retro look to it. Using mostly mask driven effects, you can have some manual control over how the electricity is dispersed against the type. VinhSon also uses his Dojo Glitch v2 script which you can get for free – Check out the tutorial for Creating an Electrical Pulsing Type Reveal in After Effects here.