by Franca Lafosse
Alpha Test “A young detective must solve a murder with the help of a hologram copy of the victim.”
Franca: Great to speak with you Stephen, and congrats on being selected for Flickerfest 2026! I wondered if we could kick off with the trajectory that Alpha Test has had in the festival circuit so far?
Stephen: Absolutely, thank you! Alpha Test initially screened at last years Adelaide Film Festival where we were lucky enough to pick up the audience award, and we’ve just played as part of the Best of Australian Shorts programme at Flickerfest in Sydney. It’s always fantastic seeing your work on a big screen and honestly, it teaches you so much about how to make a film for an audience.
This project was mostly funded by the Quicksilver initiative, through the Mercury and the South Australian Film Corporation. It’s a brilliant initiative and one of the last of its kind in Australia, which is a huge shame, because there’s no better way for emerging filmmakers to cut their teeth than through short films. I’ve made countless commercials and plenty of music videos, but it’s the short film format that’s really prepared me to tackle my first feature.
Do you think there has been anything you’ve learnt form the commercials and music video work that applies to your filmmaking, for better or worse?
Yeah, on a very basic level you meet so many crew and learn about the kinds of people you like to work with and how you like to communicate. But also on a very practical level, a huge part of directing for me is shot listing… reading a script and thinking how would I cover this, how I would most effectively portray the emotion of this moment visually. You need to do that fast on commercials, so developing that muscle has been important because I can now approach a script like Alpha Test and create an incredibly specific shot list pretty quicky. That then becomes the blueprint for everyone on set.
You’ve been making short films for a few years now, your short Hard Rubbish screened at Flickerfest in 2019, I’m wondering if and how the filmmaking process has changed for you overtime?
I always set out to make short films until I felt ready to make a feature. I made my first short in 2018 which was an autobiographical story about a time I got the snot kicked out of me as a teenager. Then my second short film was more of a message film about a child finding porn on his dad’s computer. It was designed to be topical and socially relevant. But when it came to Alpha Test, I wanted to be a bit more strategic. We’d been writing this sci-fi murder mystery for a couple years, and when you’re writing a feature there are inevitably so many great ideas that don’t make the cut. So Alpha Test came out of the debris of a bunch of versions that never made it and felt like a great calling card short. So, this is us very much going: I’m ready to make a feature, here’s what it might look and sound like, and here are the things I’m interested in talking about as a filmmaker.
Would you consider Alpha Test a proof of concept for the feature?
Yes, so if the premise of Alpha Test is: we can recreate dead people using their data, what if we use that technology to solve murders? Then the feature expands on that idea and explores how dangerous it’ll be when we start using that technology as a crutch. Like, maybe to talk to loved ones beyond the grave, to spend time with people who are no longer with us. What if we could become addicted to a feeling we experience from a someone who’s just an imitation of a human being. My writing partner Brendan Hennessy and I are obsessing over the dark places this tech could take us as a species, and honestly, it’s provided an escape from the real-world dystopia we’re currently living in.
As far as the aesthetic of Alpha Test goes, everything is so clean and sharp, even the performances of Esther and Isaac, was that something you envisioned early on?
I wanted things to feel a bit futuristic but at the same time a bit bland, like a kind of blank canvas. Behind the glass in the control room, it feels a bit more like a basement, like there’s old fans and server racks, but in the interview room itself it’s a blank slate. They’re essentially projecting things onto a clean canvas, so they want it to be simple. So, I guess the aesthetic was a mix of the storytelling, practically it just made sense, but it also makes it more manageable from a production design perspective.
Yes, I found it really striking that the film could easily translate to a play for example, because of the simplicity of the set but the complexity of the character relationships.
That’s a great point, you could absolutely imagine it as a play, using light to switch between the two rooms. I think that links to the challenge I set myself, which was to write something contained, but also try to keep people on the edge of their seats. I thought can I use just dialogue to surprise people? Because if you can do that successfully in a short, it’s easier to see how that could translate to long form. So, it’s a kind of audition really.
That’s true, because even when there was the odd special effects, ‘movie magic’ moment, it was not the effect itself that was shocking but how the character interacted and was affected by it.
Exactly, I think you could put a film like Twelve Angry Men, which was adapted from a play, up against any thriller, and it is genuinely just as exciting to watch, because the conflict at the heart of the film is life-and-death, and completely believable. I hang on every word when I watch that movie. It’s such a challenge to set for yourself but it’s so cool.
And is the focus on dialogue-driven films a shift for you or has it always been a focus in your work?
It’s definitely a shift, a learning experience, and certainly something that came out of the challenge I set to myself to keep it contained. We built a set in a studio so that we could control everything, the colour, the lighting, but we only had the studio for 3 days. So, it was very limiting in a lot of ways, but also such a blessing, because it forces you to be economic. There will always be things I wish I’d done differently, but that’s part of the learning process!
What do you hope audiences will take away from watching Alpha Test?
It feels to me that what we’re seeing happening with AI in every industry is the next stage of technological evolution, and everyone’s trying to get ahead of it. And even though we’re all discussing it on a ground level – particularly creatives – it feels like the people dropping billions of dollars into tech startups aren’t discussing, at least not publicly, whether it’s actually responsible. They’re all just trying to beat each other to market.
If I could sum up all of my feelings about this stuff in a sentence, it would be something along the lines of: technology will never replace our need for genuine human connection.
Lastly, for our emerging filmmakers are there any last words of wisdom you’d like to share?
I spent too long thinking about doing stuff and not doing it. There’s no better way to get better than by practising your craft, so fail a lot and fail early, and before you know it, you’ll be succeeding.
UPDATE: Congratulations to Stephen Packer on being awarded Best Screenplay at Flickerfest 2026.
AFTRS Award
Best Screenplay in an Australian Short Film
Prize: $1,000 AUD
Writer: Stephen Packer for ‘Alpha Test’