The characters of the game were designed by series veteran Charles Zembillas, while the environments were designed by Joe Pearson (another veteran of the series), John Nevarez, Alan Simmons and Di Davies. The karts were designed by Perry Zombolis Jr. and Andy Lomerson. Recognizing that full motion video sequences have become the new norm in state-of-the-art video games, Universal Interactive decided that "Crash Nitro Kart" would be the first game in the "Crash Bandicoot" series to feature such cinematics. The cutscenes of "Crash Nitro Kart" were created by Red Eye Studios; pre-production of the cutscenes was handled by Epoch Ink. The screenplay of the cutscenes was written by Dan Tanguay. The studio's eight artists were given four months to create 32 minutes of pre-rendered cinematics. The actual animation phase was to be completed in 15 weeks, breaking down to almost five shots a day or 15 seconds of animation per day for each artist. The in-game versions of the character models were built using 3ds Max and were outfitted with full inverse kinematic setups, morph targets and UV texture maps by Vicarious Visions. These models could not be ported directly into the cinematics due to their lower resolution for optimal real-time interactivity. Instead, the artists of Red Eye Studios worked from concept sketches provided by Vicarious Visions and used Alias Systems' Maya (with which the artists were more familiar) to enhance the detail of the 27 character models in the game, including the Crash Bandicoot character.