Generate a vertical short-form hook clip built to stop the scroll

Write a Veo 3.1 prompt for a vertical (9:16) short-form hook — the first 5-8 seconds of a video, built to stop a scrolling thumb, not a complete clip meant to stand alone.

SUBJECT AND ACTION
a street food vendor, flipping a pan of food into the air and catching it without looking, framed to fill most of the vertical frame from the very first frame — do not open on establishing wide space that a scroller has already skipped past before it resolves.

CAMERA
Quick whip-pan into a snap zoom landing on the subject's reaction, arriving at a tight close-up within the first second of the clip. State "within the first second" explicitly, not "quickly" — a hook that pays off at second two has already lost the scroll it was built to stop.

ENVIRONMENT AND LIGHTING
a busy night market stall lit by hanging string lights, natural handheld-feel lighting, nothing that reads as a lit studio. If the location has an obvious ambient light source — string lights, a window, a screen glow — name it, since Veo will otherwise default to flat, evenly lit coverage that looks staged rather than caught in the moment.

STYLE AND MOOD
Raw, unpolished, phone-shot authenticity — no cinematic color grade, no smoothed motion. Explicitly rule out the smoother, more produced look Veo defaults toward when style is left unstated; an ad-looking clip does not blend into a feed the way native short-form footage does.

AUDIO
a sharp pan clang and a nearby crowd gasp, landing sudden and sharp at the exact moment of the whip-pan and snap zoom, no music bed underneath it. Tie the sound to the visual beat by timing, not just by naming it — "at the exact moment of the whip-pan" is the instruction that makes the native audio reinforce the hook instead of trailing a half-second behind it.

CAPTION SPACE
Leave the top sixth and bottom quarter of the frame relatively uncluttered — most platforms overlay a username, caption text, and engagement buttons in exactly those zones, and a hook whose payoff is centered under where an auto-caption will render defeats itself before anyone reads it.

WHAT TO AVOID
Do not describe more than one striking beat inside this single 5-8 second window — a hook that tries to land two separate surprises back to back dilutes both, and Veo tends to smear the transition between them into an ambiguous middle beat that reads as neither. Do not add on-screen text as part of the generated video; if a caption is needed, add it after export, since Veo-rendered text is unreliable at the small, precise sizes short-form captions require.

OUTPUT
The finished prompt in the five layers above, ready to paste into Veo as-is, followed by one line stating the exact second at which the payoff lands, so pacing can be checked before generating.