Valve has a contest going on right now where you can make a music video for the Midnight Riders song Save Me Some Sugar. As the legend goes,

The Midnight Riders need your help. We haven’t seen the Riders for a long time. We were hoping they could help us with the official release of “Save Me Some Sugar” for the upcoming DLC for Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 “The Sacrifice”.

This is the first time Left 4 Dead 1 players will get to listen to the Midnight Riders while they slay zombies. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we wanted to release on YouTube their full music video for the song. This was the very first Music Video the Riders ever made “for the MTV”.

Sadly the video was lost and the Riders aren’t helping us find it. The only thing we have left behind from the band is one of Dusty’s guitars signed by the band. Dusty was not one to accept the charity of others so he had left this with management to be sold for bail money.

This leaves us with the guitar, the song, but no video.

Here’s where you can help. Make a music video for “Save Me Some Sugar” and post it on YouTube.com with the tag L4DMNRSAVESUGAR. The best video will win the guitar signed by the MNRs and a gift pack from Valve. We will wait until October 1st 2010 to judge the winning entry, so take your time.

Should you make it live action? Use game assets? Show the Riders? Well the band would have wanted this contest to have no rules. So you choose what’s in the video – THERE ARE NO STINKING RULES*!

Given the success of my last video contest entry I decided to give this one a go. I decided on the concept of a backstory for the fallen survivor in “The Passing” campaign. So far he’s the only uncommon common infected that isn’t just a guy in uniform. There are the CEDA workers, construction workers, riot police, clowns, and mud men in the other campaigns. This made the fallen survivor unique in that he is a character. He has a unique costume. If there were other fallen survivor models in game then it would be different, but there aren’t.

The concept story I came up with was the fallen survivor before he turns. He comes home to his wife, only to find she’s been rescued. He then gets sick from a bite he got that day and realizes that he isn’t immune at all. He writes a goodbye letter to his wife should she ever come back and leaves their home to go and change.

Some of the lyrics are made interesting by the video. “One day I’ll be back” takes on new meaning as well as “save me some sugar,” which could now be interpreted as him wanting her to make sure she saves bullets to kill him should they meet after he has turned.

This is a very rough first cut. It took about 30 hours of prep, writing, shopping, prop making, set building, filming, and editing to get to this point. I’ve been putting in about 2hrs a day since this was made in After Effects and Premier to refine it as much as it needs. I’m also dedicating about 8hrs per weekend until it’s good enough or until the Oct. 1st deadline comes. If I work hard enough this weekend I might get to the 90-95% point, which I would be happy to call good in case school work picks up considerably. For now, enjoy this first cut as something of a preview. There’s no editing to this other than putting clips together in Premier, so it should look and feel quite a bit more refined when I upload the final version. Let me know what you think!