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Professor Thomas Lee conducts members of the UCLA Wind Ensemble in the final rehearsal before the

Immersed in the atmosphere of a dark movie theater, where all you can see are flashing images projected onto an enormous screen, it’s often easy to forget that movies are actually multimedia projects.

Tonight at Schoenberg Hall the 50-member UCLA Wind Ensemble will demonstrate that it’s not always what you see but what you hear that can really make a film what it is.

The ensemble will be performing the live film score to director Scott Gill’s documentary “The Mars Underground” in conjunction with the film’s U.S. premiere.

The concept for this live performance initially began with the ambitions of James Dooley, who composed the film score for “The Mars Underground,” a documentary that deeply explores aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin’s vision of a manned expedition to Mars.

Dooley, who has previously worked with renowned film composer Hans Zimmer on several box-office hits, including “Pirates of The Caribbean,” “Hannibal” and the Dreamworks Animation film “Madagascar,” decided to take on “The Mars Underground” as a bit of a pet project, hoping to have the artistic freedom a large studio production often does not allow for.

“There’s different value to be found in different projects,” Dooley said. “Some you do for experience, some for clients, some for financial reasons, and some you just choose to do because you are personally attached and personally very interested and involved. This film was one of those.”

When composing on a studio level, music must be precisely and subtly embedded into the film so as not to distract audiences from the movie itself. Dooley lamented the secondary position that music must take in a film context and anticipated a medium that will allow for both the film and its score to be recognized with equal acclaim.

“I do film scores for a living and the problem with this is that once a film releases, the music kind of dies with it and doesn’t really go on beyond the film unless it’s those few pieces like the ‘Star Wars’ theme,” says Dooley. “There are a lot of us out here trying to make really great music and most of it doesn’t get heard beyond the occasional airing on cable.”

Frustrated with the deterioration of film music, Dooley decided to invigorate both film music and the concert experience itself by setting live scores to the film, all in the concert hall atmosphere. This is where the UCLA Wind Ensemble enters the scene.

Dooley got in contact with conductor Thomas Lee of the UCLA Music Department, who immediately took on the project with resounding approval, making this the opening concert for the wind ensemble this year despite both the technical and compositional difficulties of live score performances.

“This is the first time that we are doing something like this. It is a nice change of pace (since) it is rather unique in any concert setting, but just the sheer logistics of undertaking such a production is a lot of work,” said Leo Sakamoto, a graduate associate conductor of the wind ensemble.

In addition to the film score, which Dooley had to reorchestrate and condense into a 20-minute score from the film’s original 70-minute soundtrack, tonight’s concert requires a level of absolute technical precision that is often overlooked or excused for traditional concerts.

However, the members of the wind ensemble are assured that these difficulties only add to the dynamism of the innovative concert experience.

“It’s a bit scary (because) we have to rely on a lot of technology to make this work,” said Rick Espinosa, a composer who belongs to the wind ensemble. “There are two laptops that must be synchronized, synthesizers that must be trouble-checked, and then there’s the issue of ... lining up the music with the film correctly.

“The worst thing imaginable is for the music to still be playing after the film, but we are excited about this and hope the added excitement will help us draw a crowd.”

As this is the wind ensemble’s first attempt at a multimedia performance, the members hope this opening concert will expose the music department and its audience to new approaches to the traditional concerts usually held in Schoenberg Hall.

“I’m not saying that this will be the norm for concerts, but it definitely opens the door for progressively innovative productions for (our) other concerts,” Sakamoto said. “It shows students and others that the music department is not only upholding a fine musical tradition, but (we) are searching out new frontiers and fresh ideas as well.”

And beyond showing the merits of film composition, Dooley hopes the concert will show students that Schoenberg Hall can offer more than reinterpretations of classical music.

“We’re just trying to show that no, not all film composition is dead. And no, not all music in the concert hall has to be from some European guys who died two hundred years ago,” he said.