It was the strangest of goodbyes.

There was none of the finality of saying it to a terminally ill loved one in a hospital room and yet it lacked certainty, the normal "See you soon" of a typical farewells.

Jon Osbeck was seeing his older brother Erik off to war, and there were no guarantees about his return. It was Fort Dix, N.J., in the middle of winter 2005, and Erik Osbeck was among a group of men and women about to depart for the desert and Iraq.

Watching his family members and the families of all the others around them fumble for the right words to say in that situation, Jon Osbeck was moved. Erik Osbeck had a son who was only 1 year old at that time. Would he get to see his little boy grow up?

Jon Osbeck realized that this same scenario had played itself out over the course of history, not just in that moment.

"I felt I had to do something," Jon Osbeck said.

The 38-year-old Clintonville resident did. He wrote a screenplay for a film that seeks to capture what it feels like for soldiers and their loved ones to cope with that uncertainty, the open-ended "So long."

The result is "Minus One," a feature-length film that Osbeck not only wrote but also starred in and co-directed with Marc Wiskemann, 41, a professor in the Department of Cinema at Denison University.

"Jon didn't write this script because it was timely," said Wiskemann, who lives in the Easton area. "He wrote it as his way of tapping into those feelings.

"This was not a movie about war," the co-director added. "This is a movie about this experience that so many people go through of the potential loss of people you care about.

"There is a universal understanding, I think, of what that feeling might be like."

Erik Osbeck, 42, and also a Clintonville resident, did come home and served as an adviser on the set of "Minus One" as it was being filmed. Brother Jon had sought his permission before completing the screenplay.

"I felt like I had to ask him," Jon Osbeck said.

"Minus One," which had its local premier at the Arena Grand Theatre on June 29, won Best Narrative Feature at the 2010 GI Film Festival in Washington, D.C., in May.

Dino Tripodis, host of a morning radio show on Sunny 95, served as executive producer and producer of "Minus One" through his Never the Luck Productions company he started four years ago. Tripodis, 51, is also a Clintonville resident.

"First of all, I always wanted to work with Jon Osbeck," Tripodis said.

And then there was the script.

"It was intriguing, plus he had a personal slant to it," Tripodis said. "All in all, I said, yeah, I want to be a part of it.

"I think the finished product turned out great," Tripodis added. "Independent filmmaking is a tough nut to crack. That's why you see so many short films. It is very tough to get a dedicated cast and crew together for the period of time you need to make a feature film."

Tripodis, who also has a cameo in "Minus One," said that he was pretty involved in the day-to-day making of the movie.

"I was probably a little more hands-on (than more executive producers)," he said. "I brought more to the table than just a check, is what I'm trying to say."

Concentrating, as it does, on the story of a college student, a married man with a child on the way and a veteran who has been overseas before getting ready for deployment, Tripodis added, the film touches on some very human emotions.

"I think it covers a lot of the emotional aspects of what might be going on in anybody's head at any given time in that situation," he said. "It's hitting home because people have family members who have gone and are over there or there's that whole six degrees of separation that you know somebody who knows somebody who's got someone over there."

"I think it was something I had to get off my chest," Jon Osbeck said.

In an interview last week, the co-directors talked about what brought them to filmmaking, what brought them together and what brought "Minus One" about.

Osbeck fell in love with the idea of making movies watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark" when he was 10 years old, but he didn't start writing or directing films until 1999 or 2000 when he got involved with members of the local film community.

Wiskemann, who grew up in Texas, was a photographer in high school. He was thinking of going into the music business when he enrolled in college at the University of Texas, but then met some film students and switched his area of study. At 21, he moved to Los Angeles and began working as a freelance filmmaker.

"It's all I've ever done," he said.

Wiskemann has a master of fine arts from Florida State University.

"I never took a film class," Osbeck said.

In the fall of 2006, Wiskemann was putting together a short film as an exercise for his students at Denison to experience all aspects of producing a movie. The professor, who had been in Columbus for about five years at the time, was not involved in the local filmmaking community but made some contacts in order to find actors for the short his students were going to make. Osbeck's name kept coming up, Wiskemann said, so he invited him to audition.

"I knew immediately that this guy had the chops," Wiskemann said.

Impressed with Wiskemann's professionalism as a result of that experience, Osbeck said that he took the script for "Minus One" to him once it was finished. Initially, Osbeck wanted the professor to serve as cinematographer for the film while he directed solo. But early on, according to Osbeck, it became apparent that he wanted someone behind the camera he could trust while he was out in front of the lens.

"When we worked together on the short ... it was not a collaboration like 'Minus One,' " Wiskemann said. "In retrospect, we didn't know how it was going to work out when we go into the project."

Pretty well, it turns out, the two men said.

"The intention was always to tell the story with honor and dignity," Osbeck said.