# Failure Modes & How to Tame Them

**Track:** Video — beginner → intermediate — Generative AI Video — proposed
**Framework / surface:** ij8 Studio (any video model)
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** The Motion Prompt Formula

**In one line:** Flicker, morphing, hallucination, physics breaks — named, then tamed.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Generative video fails in characteristic ways, and naming them is the first step to control. Flicker is a temporal-coherence failure, where frames drift in color or texture because the model has not bound them tightly across time. Object morphing and hallucination arise when latent representations lose track of identity between frames. Physics breaks—floating debris, melting limbs, impossible momentum—reveal that the model approximates appearance, not mechanics. Optical flow, which estimates how pixels travel from one frame to the next, is the conceptual lever for diagnosing and reducing these artifacts. Treating each as an expected, named phenomenon rather than a random glitch turns troubleshooting into craft, and constraint into the cure.