PURPOSE: To improve the yield and quality and to reduce the cost by forming the pattern of a electrode group after forming a conductive film on a substrate and carrying out processes up to the formation of an oriented film consistently under vacuum without breaking the vacuum state.

CONSTITUTION: Respective chambers 5W9 are held in the vacuum state by an evacuation system 10. A substrate 1 is entered from A, heated to constant temperature in the substrate heating chamber 5 to remove impurities sticking on the surface, and then moved to an ITO vapor deposition chamber 6 through a gate valve, thereby forming an ITO film on the surface of the substrate by sputtering, etc. Similarly, metallic electrodes are formed on the ITO film in the metallic electrode vapor deposition chamber 7 and the metallic electrodes and the ITO film are irradiated selectively with laser light in a laser patterning chamber 8 to form the pattern. Finally, the substrate is entered into the oriented film vapor deposition chamber 9 to form an oriented film 4 on the electrodes by vapor-depositing SiO2 slantingly, and the substrate is taken out from B. Consequently, a liquid crystal element having uniform cell thickness is obtained stably and the yield improvement and further the cost reduction are attained.