Rewrite a failing Veo prompt to remove the compound actions causing motion artifacts

Diagnose and rewrite a Veo 3.1 prompt that produced a clip with visible motion artifacts — warped limbs, morphing between two states, geometry that distorts mid-shot, or an object that changes shape unexpectedly. This is a rewriting task, not a generation task: the goal is a corrected prompt, plus an explanation of which specific instruction most likely caused the artifact, since a negative prompt alone typically cannot fix an artifact whose root cause is a compound action asking for two incompatible things inside one continuous shot.

FAILING PROMPT
A chef flipping a pancake while the camera orbits around the pan and zooms in, kitchen steam rising, warm lighting.

WHAT THE OUTPUT ACTUALLY SHOWED
the chef's hand and wrist visibly warped and re-formed twice, both times right as the camera appeared to be mid-orbit around the pan. Describe exactly what looked wrong and roughly when in the clip it happened, since the timing often points to which described element was active at that moment.

DIAGNOSIS STEP
Break the failing prompt into its separate instructions — one subject, one action, one camera move, one lighting change, and so on — and identify which two or more of them are actually asking for incompatible or simultaneous things within the same continuous shot. the combined orbit-and-zoom camera move is likely fighting the flipping hand motion, since both are independent movements the model has to resolve in the same frames. State this suspicion explicitly and check it against where in the clip the artifact appeared; an artifact appearing at the exact moment two described actions would have to overlap is strong evidence that compound action, not a rendering fluke, caused it.

REWRITE PRINCIPLE
Rewrite the prompt to contain exactly one subject action and exactly one camera movement for this clip's duration. If the original intent genuinely needed two distinct actions or a mid-shot transition, split it into two separate generations — a first shot and a continuation — rather than trying to force both into one clip, following the same one-action-per-shot discipline other prompts in this library rely on.

NEGATIVE PROMPT FIELD
If the interface exposes a negative-prompt field (the Vertex AI Veo API accepts one directly; some consumer interfaces do not expose it), add warped hands, extra fingers, morphing, distorted geometry, blurry motion smear — specific recurring artifact terms like "warped hands, extra limbs, morphing, blurry text, distorted geometry" — as a genuine second line of defense against a small residual chance of the same artifact recurring, not as the primary fix; a negative prompt suppresses the model's tendency toward a named failure mode, it does not resolve a positive prompt that is still structurally asking for two incompatible things at once.

WHAT TO AVOID
Do not treat the negative-prompt field as a substitute for fixing the actual compound-action problem in the positive prompt — adding "no morphing" to a prompt that still describes two overlapping actions addresses the symptom's name without removing its actual cause, and the underlying structural conflict usually still produces the artifact.

OUTPUT
1. The specific instruction identified as the likely cause, with reasoning.
2. The rewritten, single-action prompt.
3. If a second shot is genuinely needed, that shot's separate prompt.
4. The negative-prompt terms to add, if the interface supports them.