In the spirit of this being a fan-edit, I decided that rather than write a completely new prologue crawl for the movie, I'm going to try and stick with the format of the original, and integrate bits of it into my own. Take a look see:
*EDIT* Apparently my copied-from-MS Word-text was bugging up some people's web browsers, so I deleted it. It doesn't matter though since I'll have a video up pretty soon anyway *EDIT*
As you can see, I plan on borrowing Magnoliafan's plot element of the Trade Federation dealing in slavery, which is both the reason for their conflict with Naboo (which in the original is very ambiguous), and it also raises the stakes. Also, the whole thing ties in a lot more with the events with Anakin on Tattoine, since he also gives a face to the slavery issue that the plot now revolves around.
Oh yeah, another thing I've been toying with the idea of: one problem that I've noticed is somewhat inherrent with some of the more extreme edits of the prequels is that if you are not watching the entire set (like say, you watch one edited film and the other two films unedited), there's a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies. This can be particularly annoying if an editor never finishes their trilogy, or you simply want to mix and match because you prefer some cuts of the film over others, and there's also the issue of how the cuts fit in with the greater canon. With my edits though, I'm hoping I can somewhat avoid that.
I've been thinking about what I want to do with Jar Jar Binks' voice, and there are a couple options I can take with it. One option, which I've done expiriments with was to completely discard his "canon" voice and make up whatever one I wanted. I liked the results, especially since it meant I wouldn't need to cut his dialogue as drastically, but there is a bit of concern about whether or not casual viewers will accept it.
The other option I've considered is to simply have Jar Jar and the other Gungans speaking in Gunganese throughout the movie, but unlike in other edits I would actually record myself speaking the dialogue in a vocal tone similar to the original characters, so that if you were to jump from my Episode 1 edit to the unedited Episode 2, the transition wouldn't be quite as jarring (although that's kind of inevitable, given how annoying un-altered Jar Jar is). It's possible that I could also release more drastic cuts that discard the larger canon and merely focus on exploring interesting new edit concepts, but I'm thinking for my first time around I'll try to keep things fairly simple, and focus on making the story better, cutting the annoying crap, and possibly doing some color correction (amongst other minor effects tweaks).
As for the Neimodians, I intend to leave much of their voicework unchanged, and I'll be re-recording it when the story necessitates it (this will probably mean dubbing over Nute Gunray and his associates completely for consistency's sake, but I'll be mimmicing their original voices).